This Racist Capitalist System Has Got to Go!

L.A. Upheaval 25 Years Later

We reprint below a 1992 Workers Vanguard article written as flames of outrage burned in Los Angeles over the racist acquittal of the cops who savagely beat black motorist Rodney King. The arrogant rulers and their kept media mouthpieces branded the L.A. upheaval a “race riot.” But that uprising and the protests that broke out from coast to coast were, in an elemental way, an eruption of the pent-up fury of America’s poor, minority and working people against growing joblessness, poverty and all-sided misery. State repression by the enforcers of this devastation was swift and bloody as the government dispatched an army of National Guard troops, Marines and federal agents—a force larger than that deployed in the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic.

When the King verdict was announced, the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/U.S., issued an April 30 statement urging:

“The working class must not allow the black population to be isolated—the powerful L.A. unions such as longshore, aerospace and city workers should organize work stoppages and mass mobilizations to solidarize with and defend the black community as the LAPD looks to spill more blood to ‘celebrate’ their racist victory over Rodney King.”

It is a measure of their prostration before the capitalist class enemy that the union misleaders did nothing to mobilize such actions.

Twenty-five years later, the conditions that sparked the L.A. upheaval are worse. Since 1992, large swaths of the black population have been forced out of the city, many to less expensive outlying desert cities. Meanwhile, South Central (renamed South L.A.) remains littered with vacant lots. L.A. has become an epicenter of homelessness in the U.S., the majority chronically unemployed black people. Parts of the city resemble a Third World country with the destitute forced to peddle their wares on the sidewalks in a desperate struggle merely to survive.

The sadistic attack on Rodney King by the notoriously racist LAPD was not unusual. What was unusual at the time was that it was captured on videotape. Today, as the roll call of black people killed at the hands of the cops continues to mount, it is all too common to watch chilling videos of their bodies being shot through with police bullets—Oscar Grant, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald. There is the occasional trial or Justice Department inquiry, but the killer cops are routinely exonerated.

In 1992, the paramilitary forces of the L.A. cops—with their armored personnel carriers, battering-ram tanks, “Blue Thunder” helicopters and SWAT teams—were the cutting edge of an all-out police war on black people, immigrants and the poor. Today, the LAPD is heralded as a model of police reform in the bourgeois press, which points to its recruitment of black and Latino cops, “community policing” programs and the widespread use of body cameras. Proclaiming that the notorious legacy of LAPD chief Daryl “Choke Hold” Gates, who headed the department in 1992, has finally been erased, one purported authority on the cops argued that the LAPD has been given “back to the people of Los Angeles” (Los Angeles Times, 18 April 2010). What the cops have given back to “the people” over the past two years is the highest number of civilians killed by any police force in the country!

No amount of reforms will change the reality of racist cop terror. These thugs in blue are doing what they are hired, trained and paid to do: enforce the rule of a capitalist system rooted in the brutal exploitation of labor and the forcible segregation of the majority of black people at the bottom of society. It made no difference 25 years ago that L.A. was run by a black mayor, the former cop Tom Bradley, just as it made no difference that Obama was the overseer of the plantation of racist American capitalism for eight years. The widespread, interracial outrage over the King verdict demonstrated the possibility of breaking down the divisions that the capitalist rulers wield to further the devastation of lives of the working class and poor. To bring down this racist capitalist system requires the leadership of a multiracial workers party in which black workers, as the most combative element in the U.S. working class, will play a leading role.

The article below originally appeared as a 4 May 1992 WV supplement and is reprinted here from Black History and the Class Struggle No. 9 (August 1992).

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MAY 3—Even as the first flames leapt into the sky over Los Angeles, accumulated seething anger erupted in cities across the country as word of the racist verdict spread. As L.A. burned, turmoil spread coast to coast. While paramilitary cops, National Guard and U.S. troops occupied South Central L.A., a state of emergency was clamped on San Francisco and Atlanta, the National Guard was called in to Las Vegas, and curfews were imposed in half a dozen cities from Berkeley to Atlanta. In every city which erupted in indignation over this verdict, bitter memories were stirred of the many other victims of rampaging cop terror.

The searing image of a lynch mob in blue uniforms sadistically, methodically, repetitively torturing a black man lying helpless on the ground became the symbol of racist police brutality in America. Now the verdict broadcast to the world what black people already know well: there is no justice in the racist capitalist courts. “They’ve been killing us, stomping us, slapping us for years,” bitterly remarked a street gang member in L.A. “And when we get ’em on tape, they get found not guilty in a system that doesn’t count for us,” added another.

“This says it’s open season on black people,” said Jody Earl, a black Angeleno, 33. Ron Boyle, 40, added, “The justice system doesn’t work in America” (San Francisco Examiner, 1 May). This conspicuously interracial outburst against the oppressive cops and courts spread so dramatically because of years of grinding poverty and social conditions oppressing Latinos and many whites as well as blacks. Polls show an overwhelming majority of the population disagreed with the verdict absolving the cops who beat Rodney King. One reported that even 47 percent of whites think the rioting is “understandable.”

The racist media, while playing over and over pictures of the vicious beating of a white truck driver, hesitated in vilifying the desperate crowds that took to the streets. They whine that “there are better ways” to protest, but it’s obvious that the wave of unrest has at least focused world attention on the grievances of black America. As demonstrators from Berlin to New Delhi solidarized with the explosion of rage in Los Angeles, and racist rulers from Japan to South Africa scoffed at Washington’s pretensions to world “leadership,” Bush & Co. worry that their “New World Order” could go up in smoke. America’s rulers know they are guilty, and they’re nervous as hell—as well they should be.

The malicious California governor Pete Wilson—who wants to starve welfare mothers and just ordered the first execution in the state in 25 years—called out the National Guard, at the behest of black Democratic mayor Bradley. And the haughty imperial president George [H.W.] Bush got on TV with a “get tough” speech announcing that U.S. troops were being deployed. Armored personnel carriers rolled into South Central. It was the Seventh Infantry from Fort Ord, which carried out the invasion of Panama, Marines from the Gulf War, SWAT kill squads made up of FBI, federal marshals and Border Patrol. Now this army of occupation of 30,000 heavily armed troops aims its bayonets at blacks, Latinos and Asians at home.

In the face of the police-state occupation of black and Latino L.A. it is necessary to mobilize the power of the integrated union movement. Hours after the cops moved in, the Partisan Defense Committee issued a leaflet demanding that the major unions including longshore, aerospace and city workers must organize work stoppages and mass mobilizations to solidarize with and defend the ghettos and barrios now literally under the gun. We demand: Cops, troops out of the ghettos and barrios!

After three days in L.A., the death toll exceeded that of the 1965 Watts riots and even that of Detroit in 1967: it currently stands at 49 dead, of whom at least 17 are black, 15 are Hispanic, 8 white, and 2 Asian. The police and press are covering up the numbers of victims of the cops. As CNN reporter Charles Zewe reported from the scene, of the dead “most of those who died were black, most of those who died were shot in confrontations with police.” There were 1,765 reported injuries and 6,345 arrests.

L.A. is “seething with a kind of rage I’ve never seen,” said Zewe. A 52-year-old black man remarked, “Martin Luther King was a waste. His methods have changed nothing.” Black people are being pushed beyond the limit, terrorized by cops and courts, driven out of the industrial workforce, denied decent education and housing. U.S. capitalism has no use for a whole generation of black ghetto youth who were once kept on the bench as a “reserve army of labor.” Now all that awaits them is death—slow death from epidemics of disease, malnutrition and drugs, or fast, in the gas chamber or gunned down on the streets. On points, the U.S. is now worse than South Africa, where they just sentenced a white cop to hang for ordering a 1988 massacre of eleven black people, but the death penalty has been suspended there.

The rage of the inner city intersects widespread frustration and disgust extending throughout the population. Particularly in this election year, it is self-evident that both capitalist parties are bankrupt. Meanwhile, the abject betrayal by the UAW tops of even the mainly white, middle-aged Midwest Caterpillar strikers has driven home the need to sweep out the racist, bought-and-paid-for AFL-CIO bureaucracy.

The Rodney King verdict has illuminated the whole system of American capitalism, built on a bedrock of racist oppression. It cannot be reformed, it must be smashed. The question is how. The situation cries out for revolutionary leadership, to organize the social power of labor and unite behind it all the oppressed in a struggle for state power that gets rid of the whole rotten racist capitalist system and opens the road for genuine emancipation for all.

King Verdict Lit the Match

Day after day, black L.A. watched on TV the “trial” of four of the more than a dozen racist cops involved in beating Rodney King. Once the case had been moved out of L.A. to lily-white Simi Valley, a bedroom suburb for cops and home of the “Ronald Reagan Memorial Library,” it was all over. In Simi Valley they love L.A. police chief Daryl Gates, the Sultan of SWAT, who earned his spurs as an LAPD commander in Watts in ’65 and defended his killer cops by “explaining” that blacks just die more often than “normal people” from the choke hold. For anyone trying to get a conviction of the cops (which the prosecution wasn’t), this was “the jury from hell,” as one commentator put it. As his aunt, Angela King, said on TV: “Rodney King is out there on that ground begging for his life, and I’m sure those jurors saw that videotape 1,000 times and felt no remorse.”

In contrast to Simi Valley, South Central is 95 percent non-white, equally black and Latino, “a flat plain of poverty and high unemployment” (San Francisco Chronicle, 1 May). A decade ago, ten of the twelve largest non-aerospace factories in the area were shut down, decimating the unionized black workforce. Between 1973 and 1986, the average yearly income of black high school graduates in Los Angeles declined by 44 percent, while Latino earnings fell 35 percent. This is the tinderbox in which the racist verdict in the “Rodney King trial” lit the match. One effect of the rioting was to bring together the warring black and Latino street gangs against the cops. Graffiti on one wall read, “Crips Bloods Mexicans together forever tonite 4/30/92.”

The ghetto explosion exacerbated tensions between black residents and Korean merchants (as well as the community of Koreatown just north of South Central). When Jewish shopowners left after the ’65 Watts riots, the Koreans moved in—and became a lightning rod for plebeian resentments. This was crystallized by the killing of black teenager Latasha Harlins last March, shot in the back of the head by a Korean store owner. Now, caught in a vise, Korean merchants responded to the looting with murderous gunfire, while thousands of Koreans then marched with desperate appeals for “peace and justice.” The racist hostility against Koreans, whipped up by black nationalist demagogues and aspiring black businessmen who want to exploit “their” market, is a poisonous diversion from the real enemy of the black masses. Most West Coast Asians are among the most miserably exploited people around.

While the bourgeoisie fumed about the “criminality” of looters trucking away goods from broken store windows, by all indications this was a thoroughly integrated affair of downtrodden and impoverished people. This is indeed understandable, but won’t do anything to eliminate the entrenched poverty of America’s inner cities. As we wrote at the time of the 1960s ghetto explosions:

“For the last three summers ghettos across the country have been rocked by elemental, spontaneous, non-political upheavals against the prevailing property relations and against the forces of the state which protect these relations. In no case have they been genuine race riots. The risings have usually been provoked by the police, in the course of ‘normal’ brutalities (Watts 1965) or in an effort to crush a movement which is exceeding the bounds set for it by bourgeois society (Harlem 1964). As the struggle against the police expands, the black street-fighters turn on the merchants and shopkeepers, the visible representatives of the oppressive class society, and smash whatever cannot be carried off. Yet despite the vast energies expended and the casualties suffered, these outbreaks have changed nothing. This is a reflection of the urgent need for organizations of real struggle, which can organize and direct these energies toward conscious political objectives. It is the duty of a revolutionary organization to intervene where possible to give these outbursts political direction.”

—“Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” Spartacist Supplement, May-June 1967

The point is not to seize articles of consumption but to expropriate the means of production. And that takes a leap in consciousness and organization to do away with the capitalist order.

Riots are an expression of despair, often including ugly incidents of indiscriminate attacks on individuals who happen to find themselves at the wrong place. In the ’60s, ghetto uprisings were the product of the failure of the civil rights movement to make a dent in the racist conditions in the urban centers of the North. To do so meant going up directly against the Democratic Party—to which the liberal preachers like Martin Luther King Jr. were beholden—and attacking the capitalist economic underpinnings of black superexploitation and discrimination. While avowed revolutionary nationalists like the Black Panther Party were active in the ghettos at that time, today what is most striking is the utter vacuum of black leadership.

There’s a sense among many blacks that they won’t get anything until they burn the place down. But as many have pointed out, after the ’67 riots that devastated black Detroit, it was never built up again. But the deeper truth is that Detroit turned into a ghost town because the auto bosses looted the industry and closed down plant after plant. It’s the capitalists who have destroyed the wealth of this country built up by the sweat of the workers. It’s not who’s in the White House but the inexorable workings of an irrational system.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

A program for black emancipation must start with the knowledge that the whole system of racist capitalist oppression has got to be brought down. In the ’60s this was taken as a given by militant radical leaders, like Malcolm X and the Panthers, but many were gunned down by the FBI’s murderous COINTELPRO or thrown behind bars, while more opportunist elements joined the Democratic Party. But even the best of these militant fighters failed to understand that the only social force that could eliminate this racist system is the integrated working class.

To change the consciousness of frustrated black youth, in the first instance what is required is a powerful struggle for jobs. This is not a matter of going hat in hand to lobby (beg) Congress, but of mobilizing the organized labor movement in militant struggle for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay, for union hiring halls with union-run job training and skills upgrading programs to enroll minority youth. In sweatshop havens like L.A., organizing the unorganized can greatly reduce the rampant poverty.

The power of labor, breaking with the tame trade-union bureaucrats, must be brought to bear in the fight for black emancipation, acting as a champion of all the oppressed. For mass organized labor/black defense against racist terror—gun control kills blacks! And the working people must be mobilized politically to defend their class interests. As Spartacist League spokesman Don Alexander said at a May 2 Bay Area SL educational conference, “From black Democratic Party mayor Tom Bradley to Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton and Willie Brown and Ron Dellums, the capitalist ruling class and their political representatives are united in defense of white racist ‘law and order’ and in suppressing with cops and troops the burning rage of the masses.” “Workers revolution…that’s when we’ll get our justice!”

This generation has grown up without seeing mass social struggle, so many don’t see where the power will come from to accomplish this. There is a basis for multiracial unity in this country, but it can never be on the basis of “reforming” a status quo which forcibly keeps one race on the bottom. Not empty appeals for “brotherhood” but the fight to smash capitalist exploitation and oppression can bring the working people of all races together. The key factor in that struggle is the building of a multiracial workers party on a revolutionary program.