Oct. 22 Coalition Meeting on Cop Brutality

LBL vs. "Anybody but Bush" Maoists

NEW YORK CITY—In the months following the police killing of Sean Bell, the 23-year-old black man gunned down in a storm of 50 cop bullets on his wedding day last November 25, various leftist organizations have joined protests against cop terror, raising such reform schemes as “community control” of the police. The widespread anger over the Sean Bell killing was seen when tens of thousands of people, predominantly black, marched down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue on December 16. On March 16, with the city poised on edge, a Queens grand jury handed down indictments against three of the five cops involved in the killing, two charged with manslaughter and one with reckless endangerment.

On March 3, a meeting held by the October 22 Coalition, a group initiated by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), afforded an unusual opportunity for counterposing our revolutionary socialist program to the reformist program put forward by the RCP and others. The meeting was addressed by several parents of victims of cop terror, who spoke movingly about the tribulations, abuse and persecution they experienced while vainly seeking justice for their children’s deaths. Juanita Young spoke of her son, Malcolm Ferguson, who was shot dead by the cops in March 2000. Young herself was evicted from her apartment and arrested for “criminal trespass” in retaliation for her activism following her son’s death. Nicholas Heyward Sr., whose 13-year-old son Nicholas had been playing cops-and-robbers with a toy pistol when shot dead by the cops in September 1994, also spoke.

Speaking on behalf of the RCP and as cofounder of the October 22 Coalition, Carl Dix repeated an earlier speaker’s call for “revolution” and said that police brutality is “built into the fabric of the racist white supremacist capitalist system.” While Dix appealed for unity with the ghetto and barrio population and for “seeking allies throughout society,” the RCP’s coalition made clear what kind of “allies” Dix meant by giving Democratic Party city councilman Charles Barron star billing for the event. (Barron didn’t show.)

Barron has some “street cred” due to his former membership in the Black Panther Party and his occasional radical rhetoric. But he showed his true colors when, along with Al Sharpton and other bourgeois politicians as well as preachers, he appeared at Mayor Bloomberg’s side as City Hall appealed for “dialogue” following the Sean Bell killing. Barron has mainly been demanding the firing of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As capitalist politicians, Barron and Sharpton’s aim is to get ahead of any social explosion in order to contain it.

A representative of the New York Labor Black League for Social Defense, which is allied with the Spartacist League, intervened during the discussion period to counterpose a strategy based on mobilizing the social power of the working class. The LBL spokesman, who is a member of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, emphasized that police brutality was not an aberration, and that the cops, courts and prison system are the core of capitalists’ repressive state apparatus. He pointed out that racial oppression is a pillar of U.S. capitalist society, whether the government is led by Democrats or Republicans.

The LBL speaker called for labor-led, integrated mass protest against police killings. He cited the December 2005 transit strike as an example of labor’s potential power, in contrast to photo ops for Charles Barron. The cops executed Sean Bell on the street because he was black, and the same state power seeks to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and MOVE supporter, because they see in him the spectre of black revolution. The transit strike, he remarked, demonstrated the social power that must be mobilized to free Mumia.

The RCP has demonstrated its lack of a proletarian perspective by even dropping the word “worker” from its newspaper’s masthead (formerly Revolutionary Worker, now Revolution). The LBLer stated that World Can’t Wait, one of the pro-Democratic Party outfits created by the RCP, is part of the “Anybody but Bush” crowd (see “Down With U.S. Imperialism! For Class Struggle at Home!” WV No. 888, 16 March). In response to those who spoke of “revolution,” he said that the question is how to fight for it. As against the RCP’s class collaborationism, we fight to build a proletarian party, independent of and in opposition to the capitalist political parties, to lead the struggle for socialist revolution.