The working-class road forward in tackling crime and cop violence
https://themilitant.com/2021/06/12/the-working-class-road-forward-in-tackling-crime-and-cop-violence/
BY MARY MARTIN
Vol. 85/No. 24
June 21, 2021
SWP candidate for Minneapolis mayor Doug Nelson, inset. Campaign points
to how 1964 Black rights protests led by Gloria Richardson, above, in
Maryland built solidarity, cut crime.
ABOVE, AP PHOTO; INSET, MILITANT/MARY MARTIN
SWP candidate for Minneapolis mayor Doug Nelson, inset. Campaign points
to how 1964 Black rights protests led by Gloria Richardson, above, in
Maryland built solidarity, cut crime.
MINNEAPOLIS — Supporters of Socialist Workers Party candidates Doug
Nelson for mayor and David Rosenfeld for City Council in Ward 12 here
had a successful weekend June 5-6 campaigning with workers on their
doorsteps and collecting signatures to put Nelson on the ballot. Several
party members from Chicago joined the effort, capped by a Militant Labor
Form where the candidates addressed the recent rise in shootings,
assaults and robberies in working-class neighborhoods across the country
— a topic campaigners have found is on the minds of many working people.
At the end of the weekend some 260 signatures were in hand, over half
the requirement of 500. Campaign supporters plan to go well over that by
the beginning of July to assure Nelson’s spot on the ballot.
Campaigners went to several neighborhoods across the city, including
Powderhorn, where George Floyd square is located, a center of protests
against police brutality and the site of a memorial for Floyd, who was
killed by Officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. During the protests parts
of this area were hit by arson and looting, which shut down groceries,
pharmacies and other stores that employed and serviced many from the
neighborhood.
“During the riots you would wake up in the morning and see that the gas
station that was on the corner was gone,” Powderhorn resident Jean
Marshall told this reporter at her doorstep. “You would go to work in
the morning and come home at night and find the corner store burned to
the ground. And the people who did this don’t live here. I’m also not
for getting rid of the police. I don’t see how that would work.”
Mass protest in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 31, 2020, against cop
brutality, death of George Floyd. People in working-class neighborhoods
where shops were hit by arson and looting, and who face growing
anti-social violence, don’t support liberals’ calls to “defund,” abolish
the police.
PIONEER PRESS/SCOTT TAKUSHI
Mass protest in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 31, 2020, against cop
brutality, death of George Floyd. People in working-class neighborhoods
where shops were hit by arson and looting, and who face growing
anti-social violence, don’t support liberals’ calls to “defund,” abolish
the police.
While virtually every block of the city is dotted with signs supporting
the fight against police brutality, SWP campaigners have found
opposition widespread in working-class areas to calls by some liberal
politicians, middle-class radicals and Black Lives Matter misleaders to
disband or “defund” the police.
“Because workers have to deal with the consequences of the real world
and its contradictions on a daily basis, they can’t afford to act as if
they live in a ‘woke’ fantasy,” Nelson said at the forum, attended by a
couple dozen workers and youth, including some who learned about the
event from campaigners.
“Crime is defined by the capitalist rulers to maintain their power and
privileges,” Nelson said. “Their laws and the way they’re enforced are
designed to keep workers in line and to brand substantial layers of us
as criminals, particularly those who are Black or from other oppressed
nationalities. To the bosses and landlords in power, all workers are
viewed as potentially dangerous.
“What is of great concern to workers, however, is anti-social violence
within working-class communities,” he said. “In addition to the
immediate consequences for those affected, it breeds fear and
demoralization; it saps workers’ confidence and tears at social
solidarity. This in turn feeds into more anti-social behavior and
spreads the infection of capitalist dog-eat-dog morality. The rulers’
cops and courts are aimed against us, but it is far better to live under
their rule of law than without it, where warlords, gangs and vigilantes
fill the gap.
“One of the obvious factors in the recent rise in violent crime has been
the systematic withdrawal of police in certain working-class
neighborhoods, particularly those with the highest crime rates,” Nelson
said. “The effect was no surprise to anyone, least of all the government
officials who organized it as part of the rulers’ political responses to
the broad popular demonstrations that exploded across the country
following the death of Floyd, as well as the unpopular and anti-social
rioting and looting. They decided to sacrifice some beat cops
responsible for Floyd’s death, and to have the police pull back from
many of our communities.
“Calls by some capitalist politicians to ‘defund’ or remake the police
were always phony. It is the police force of the class they support, not
ours, and they will pay them and use them wherever they need them. At
the pickets against the Marathon Petroleum lockout in nearby St. Paul
Park, the oil bosses pay local cops handsomely to act as strikebreakers.
In this capacity the cops are fulfilling their primary role, a fact that
is less obvious today in the absence of big union battles,” Nelson said.
Working-class solidarity
“During the big union organizing drives described in Teamster Rebellion
by Farrell Dobbs that took place here in the 1930s, the capitalists
faced growing popular resistance that posed a threat to their political
power, unlike today,” he said. “Following a mass demonstration of 40,000
against a cop killing of a worker, the city quickly transformed its
police into a force capable of meeting out violence against the
strikers. They systematically weeded out every cop who could not be
relied upon to shoot workers on order, and augmented this by organizing
thugs to carry out extralegal violence.
“Since the police exist to protect the profit-driven system that breeds
crime, there is no ‘policing policy’ solution to it,” Nelson told the
forum. “In decades past, the rulers encouraged ‘broken windows’
policing, stop and frisk, and the massive railroading of workers to
prison for longer and longer sentences. Crime statistics declined, but
at an enormous social and moral price for working people.
“Communists are for dismantling the capitalist police, but only when the
workers have taken political power and have forged experienced
class-conscious combatants to replace them. This is precisely what
workers have done every time they have taken power and set up their own
government — from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the 1959 revolution led
by Fidel Castro in Cuba, where gangsters, cops and government henchmen
terrorized workers and peasants until these forces of repression were
replaced by the Rebel Army and a new revolutionary police force that
eliminated the vast majority of anti-social violence and other crime.”
People must wake up to their worth
Rosenfeld talked about the legal violence of capitalism and social
consequences for the breakdown of the family it breeds. There is no pat
solution to stop violent crimes and shootings under capitalism and its
dog-eat-dog values of competition that undermine solidarity and
working-class consciousness. The normal workings of capitalism result in
over 2 million deaths and disabling injuries worldwide of workers on the
job every year as a necessary part of production for profit.
One forum participant described attending a funeral in which the ushers
were armed, and asked, “What can be done about the proliferation of guns
among youth?”
“We have to fight for social solidarity and draw the broadest numbers of
people into supporting the strikes and social struggles that exist today
and will grow,” Rosenfeld said. “This may not seem realistic to some,
yet it is the only realistic solution.”
Rosenfeld described how anti-social crime fell by 75% during the
sustained mobilizations against Jim Crow segregation in Cambridge,
Maryland, in 1964 led by Gloria Richardson.
“Strengthening working-class solidarity and organization in struggle is
our answer to those who prey on other working people, as well as to cop
violence, until we can make a revolution, take power into our own hands
and begin to rebuild society based on our morals, not theirs,” Rosenfeld
said.
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Hong Kong protests defy ban, mark Tiananmen massacre
Autoworkers back on picket line in Volvo Truck strike
Ongoing protests in Colombia hit jobs crisis, police brutality
Graves of Indigenous youth provoke outrage in Canada
Women in Dominican Republic protest ban on abortion
Campaign to expand reach of ‘Militant,’ books, fund April 24 - June 29
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--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept