The Capitalist State and the Renegade “Bolshevik Tendency”

On “Jail Killer Cops”

The police execution of Oscar Grant was a chilling illumination of the savage violence, racism and terror of the capitalist state and its armed thugs. But this wasn’t the message of the misnamed “Bolshevik Tendency” (BT). On the contrary, the BT’s only response was devoted to excoriating the Spartacist League for exposing the illusions in the “democracy” of the capitalist state, such as are put forward by reformists like the Party for Socialism and Liberation and its ANSWER Coalition. Such illusions are what lie behind the call to “jail killer cops,” a slogan raised by ANSWER at the Oakland protests against the cop killing of Grant. In a 29 January article on its Web site, “Polemic with the Spartacist League—On Jailing Killer Cops,” the BT takes umbrage at our statement:

“The capitalist rulers are hardly going to jail their own police guard dogs. And, even if one cop were charged and imprisoned, it wouldn’t stop police brutality and terror. The cops serve, together with the military and the prisons, as the core of a state whose purpose is the repression of the working class and oppressed by any means necessary.”

—“Oscar Grant Killed in Cold Blood by BART Cop,” WV No. 928, 16 January

After a perfunctory nod to our Marxist understanding of the state, the BT goes on to opine that “advocacy of a revolutionary solution to social oppression does not, however, mean that Marxists are not also prepared to advance certain concrete, usually negative, demands on bourgeois authority.” But it is a far cry from a “negative” demand, such as opposition to particular oppressive or reactionary laws, to call on the capitalist state to jail its own killer cops.

The Bolsheviks didn’t call to “Jail the Killer Freikorps” when Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by these reactionary thugs at the behest of the ruling Social Democrats in their bloody onslaught against the 1918-19 German Revolution. Just the opposite. The Bolsheviks honored these fallen revolutionary leaders with searing indictments of the fraud of bourgeois democracy and its Social Democratic bloodhounds. In a speech to a mass demonstration of Moscow workers and Red Army units to protest the murders, Lenin declared: “The example of the German revolution proves that ‘democracy’ is only a camouflage for bourgeois robbery and the most savage violence.”

In contrast, the BT’s cry to “jail the killer cops” borrows from the social-democratic lie that this state can be made accountable to the “will of the people.” The BT says so itself, writing, “whenever a few cops can be held accountable for a few of their crimes it is a small victory for their victims.” In reality, even on those rare occasions where the rulers find it necessary to punish one of their murderous gendarmes, the purpose is to refurbish illusions in the state as some kind of “neutral” arbiter. Such occasional “democratic” facelifts are in turn designed to bolster the effectiveness of the state’s armed forces against the working class, black people and any and all perceived enemies of the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Cops, Crime and the BT

Following the killing of Oscar Grant, the BT resurrected its “Cops, Crime & Capitalism” article, which was written in the aftermath of the 1992 multiracial explosion of protest against the acquittal of the racist L.A. cops who mercilessly beat Rodney King. At the time, the BT was peddling its wares to the “police reform” liberals in Berkeley “Copwatch.” Echoing Copwatch’s “nonviolence” credo that “all cops are not into police brutality,” the BT added: “The police occasionally do useful things, of course, such as directing traffic, comforting children and even risking their lives to rescue victims of disasters.” They even went on to provide an alibi for the racism and brutality of the police, arguing that this is the product of “their function of controlling people who live in brutally dehumanizing conditions on the margins of society”—i.e., ghettos. Indeed a goodly portion of “Cops, Crime & Capitalism” is devoted not to rampant cop terror but to “crime”—the code word for whipping up racist reaction and getting more cops on the streets—even providing an Interpol readout from the time of statistics for murders, rapes and robberies in the U.S.!

Today, the BT’s “anti-crime” fearmongering is a not-so-distant echo of the fear and loathing of the ghetto masses on the part of Oakland mayor Ron Dellums and other black elected officials, who rail against “black-on-black” crime and pour more cops into the streets. Indifference to the brutal reality of black oppression in the U.S. has long defined the BT. In May 1985, when Philadelphia cops—at the behest of black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode in collusion with the FBI—bombed the MOVE household, incinerating eleven black men, women and children and burning down an entire black neighborhood, the BT couldn’t even choke out its cringing call to “jail the killer cops.” In fact, the BT didn’t protest at all! Instead, in the very first issue of their paper 1917 the BT took the occasion of this racist atrocity to sneer at the Spartacist League for only “denouncing the authors of the hideous massacre” rather than politically attacking the victims at a 1985 New York City memorial meeting we organized in solidarity with MOVE.

In its January 29 polemic against us, the BT argues, “If calling for jailing killer cops only creates illusions in the capitalist state, one might imagine that this would also be true of demands for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal or abolishing the racist death penalty.” The BT’s cynicism reflects its appetite to swim in the same stream as those who call for a “new trial” for Mumia. That call and the demand to “jail the killer cops” are both born of the same illusions in the inherent “justice” of the capitalist rulers. Our fight to free Mumia is based not on appeals for “justice” from the capitalist state, but on mobilizing the social power of the multiracial working class in opposition to the capitalist state. The demand to abolish the racist death penalty is likewise predicated not on faith in this state but in principled opposition to any state being accorded the right to determine who lives and who dies.

The BT’s “On Jailing Killer Cops” points to the fact that we have “raised similar demands in the past.” That is true and we stopped doing so in the early 1990s precisely because we recognized that calling on the state to jail its own armed thugs was a social-democratic repudiation of the Marxist understanding of the state. Now, the BT opines that “the ostentatiously sectarian impulse evident in opposing the call to jail killer cops” is matched by our opposition to running for executive offices of the capitalist state. Indeed, both positions flow from the understanding, codified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, that “the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” As we wrote in “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009): “The question of the state is a life-and-death question for a revolutionary workers party. It is the question of revolution.” Shattering illusions in the “democracy” of the capitalist state is vital to building a revolutionary vanguard party to fight for the class rule of the proletariat. That is our purpose. The purpose of the BT is otherwise.

As we wrote in “Cops, Crime and the BT” (WV No. 569, 12 February 1993), the BT’s “‘Cops, Crime and Capitalism’ is simply their attempt to give a ‘proletarian’ facelift to liberal ‘law and order’ reaction.” Today it is recycled to “reach out” to those seeking to channel outrage over the killing of Oscar Grant into schemes to whitewash police terror. The BT’s accompanying polemic against us for refusing to go along with the lies of the liberals and reformists is simply another ticket for entry into the Bay Area pro-Democratic Party swamp.