PHOTO/ADRIAN GARCIA
DETROIT, MI — The month of October launched a series of organized protest, marches, lectures, and actions of civil disobedience in response to the murder of Mike Brown. “#Ferguson October” is more than just a twitter handle. It is the insignia of a burgeoning movement spawned by the response to the Mike Brown slaughter at the hands of the Police. The city of Shaw, Missouri recently witnessed the murder of one of their young African-American community members as well. The purpose of “#Ferguson October” was to educate people and resist the militarization of the police in the U.S., not just in Shaw and Ferguson, MO.
The new form of fascism that we see in this country has been a more recent phenomena based on changes in the economy which is eliminating workers from the point of production and placing them in situations where their livelihood is tenuous. In order to subdue any resistance to these macro-economic changes to the political infrastructure of this society, which is purely capitalist, they have dispatched the goons to keep the people in order. It takes form in many different realities, but the most evident currently is the relationship between the police and many working class African-American communities. The Mike Brown murder has often been discussed as an issue, solely, of blatant racism. History tells us that racism is one of the many byproducts of a fascist society.
There is no denying that racism is present on a systemic level with mass incarceration and police brutality the lynchpins of those arguments. The response by the police and society as a whole has its roots in the construct of our society’s political economy and how that has changed so drastically. Why do the police need to be militarized? Why does the working class need to be divided into racial and ethnic categories?
Being involved in the “#Ferguson October” movement, and coming from Detroit where we’ve had our share of racist and fascist responses by the local, state, and federal government, it’s clear why the movement building in Ferguson and beyond is vital. Bringing a delegation of activists from Detroit that included different sectors of the movement was a key learning apparatus. It spoke to the multidimensional aspect of the overall class struggle.
We all are involved in different struggles but it was apparent that this situation needed everyone’s attention, energy, and effort. Not only does the Brown family deserve it, but the entire working class Black, Brown, and white deserves to know the true nature of the beast they are facing and start to build strategies on how to defeat it.
This is no longer a Black struggle, or a youth struggle, or even a struggle between which struggle is the most prescient. This is about class struggle and for the first time, our society is being put “on blast”, as one young person from Ferguson remarked at a rally near their police station, for its problems.
