Stop the Rising American Police State

At a time when poverty is spreading like wildfire and good-paying jobs are a thing of the past for most of us, regardless of color, America’s wealthy rulers are trying to keep the working class from turning on them. We can see their strategy in the way the corporate media portrays the ongoing police murders of Black workers: The rulers plan to ensure our working class is divided along lines of color and culture, and get us fighting each other instead of them. In the process they will try to provoke a crisis as an excuse for imposing a full-blown fascist police state.
History offers examples. On February 27, 1933, someone burned down the German parliament (Reichstag). The Nazi government falsely portrayed the fire as part of a Communist plot to overthrow the state, and the government suspended constitutional rights and decreed its authority to jail political opponents without specific charges, dissolve political organizations, and suppress publications.
America’s rulers are aiming for their own version of the Reichstag fire. First they launch an assault on the workers, focused on the Black workers. Given the legacy of slavery and the history of racism, at least a large section of society can be convinced that the assault is a “Black issue,” and therefore not their problem. The ruling class, through its militarized police forces, carries out repeated provocations against the Black workers in particular. The goal is to spark a provocation that will then be used as an excuse for a crackdown. A police state will be imposed in the name of fighting “domestic terrorism.” Workers will lose their rights.
The rulers need a police state because they have no solution to joblessness and poverty. The computer and the robot have wiped out jobs and created a new section of the working class that is permanently unemployed or marginally employed in low-wage jobs. Those of us who are in this new section of workers are of every color, nationality and age. We are united by our common conditions, and for us there is no resolution to the crisis except to overturn the existing economic system, which is based on the private property of the billionaires, and build a cooperative society where the means of producing the food, education, healthcare and other necessities are publicly owned and everyone’s needs are met. We, the workers who cannot survive under this system, are a threat to the ruling class, and so the rulers must guarantee we are divided, stripped of all rights, and unable to fight.
The protests are showing that we are one people and one class of workers, and an assault on any worker is an assault on every worker, and an attack on democracy. The workers of every color who are being discarded in post-industrial America face a common poverty, a common oppression and a common enemy. Our enemy is an economic system based on private property and the ruling class that defends it. We can build a new society free of poverty, racism and police terror. The key step is to build a powerful movement that fights every instance of police terror and that is united around a program that our government guarantee the basic necessities of life to everyone. It is in this fight against our common poverty that we can find true unity, true justice and real democracy.