SYC Speaker: “Cops Are Not Workers, They Are Strikebreakers”

We print below a speech, edited for publication, given by a Spartacus Youth Club representative to an Occupy Oakland protest against police brutality at the encampment outside City Hall on October 29.

The brutal attack on Occupy Oakland, the mass arrests, tear-gassing and nearly lethal attack on Scott Olsen by an army of cops shows what the police are all about: repression, racist terror and murder. Along with the courts, prisons and military, the cops make up the armed fist of the state, which defends the property and profits of the capitalist ruling class. Cops are not workers, they are strikebreakers. They shot Oscar Grant down in cold blood. Cops are not potential allies, they are our enemy.

The slogan “We are the 99 percent” actually blurs the class line and disguises the class nature of the capitalist state and all its political parties. Some people think that [mayor] Jean Quan betrayed the protesters. But in reality she is a Democratic Party capitalist politician who was doing her job as the city commander of the OPD [Oakland Police Department], just like Obama does as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism.

The Democrats, every bit as much as the Republicans, are the politicians of the capitalist ruling class. And Quan simply showed the reality behind the sometime “progressive” mask the Democrats put on to fool the workers and oppressed. Now the Democrats, whose hands are dripping with the blood of millions of victims of U.S. imperialism at home and abroad, are swooping in to channel the protesters’ anger into the shell game of electoral politics.

The current economic crisis has sparked the mass protests. But to actually end exploitation and oppression, you have to do something fundamentally different. We are fighting to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will lead the workers in smashing the capitalist state, expropriating the banks and corporations and building a socialist world in which those who labor rule.