PHOTO/BOB SIMPSON
Every day we hear of a new police killing of an unarmed person, usually someone poor, young, of color or disabled. The police murdered 176 people in January and February 2015. Revelations emerged about a detention center in Chicago where people are held, tortured CIA-style, outside any legal proceedings—many for political dissent— and one man was found dead in his cell. A homeless man with the street name ‘Africa’ is gunned down in downtown Los Angeles, while his friends shout their horrified protests. Most recently, the police murder of a teenaged student in his Madison, Wisconsin home is sparking mass outrage. Militarized police forces break into terrified people’s homes like storm troopers, gunning down women and children. The outcry and sustained demonstrations sweeping this country against the murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York, and so many others, are the beginning of a mass social response against this terror, and the corrupt system of laws that uphold it.
For the homeless, those this crumbling economy has driven into the streets, every aspect of their lives is criminalized. Towns and cities across the country are passing legislation against necessary survival activities: sleeping, sitting down, ‘lodging’, squatting empty buildings, asking for money for food. It is now illegal in 33 cities and towns to share food with homeless people. Shut-down prisons and detention centers are proposed as ‘housing’ for the homeless, as laws are passed to criminalize people and sweep them out of sight, to hide this human evidence of a mean and failing social order. Jails are becoming the homeless shelters of today.
The introduction of computerized and robotized production is replacing a rapidly growing section of workers from all levels of society. These insecure, contingency, part-time and thrown-out workers are of all backgrounds, nationalities and colors. They are one layoff, sickness or eviction from the streets, or already there. They have in common that they must fight for what they need to survive. The capitalist system can’t and won’t support workers it doesn’t need to exploit. It can only meet their demands with terror and violence. This rising police-state fascism protects the interests of the corporations, which hold what people need as private property. The demands of workers for what they need are bringing them up against a system which has thrown them out. This can only be resolved under a new society—one that provides for all.
Whether in their struggles for the necessities of life or against police brutality and murder, people are organizing to demand what is rightfully and humanly theirs, in a world free of violence, war and want. Their demands for justice, and for what they need to survive and thrive, are in reality a cry for a transformed economic and political system where the abundance the new technology creates is distributed according to need. A powerful movement is arising that can fight for this new society.
The task today is to devise a strategy to get us to a society that is designed with working class interests in mind, and to organize for implementation of that strategy. We must also remember that strategy is ever-evolving as new conditions confront us in struggle. For example, I posit that a possible strategy to respond to the ongoing police killings is to organize for implementation of legislation that will identify police conduct that is prosecutable so that a decision to prosecute is not the individual decision of grand juries or state prosecutors. In addition, we also need a working class-based Congress that will implement and enforce legislation that is in our interests. These two things — legislation in working class interests, and a working-class based Congress to implement and enforce such legislation — go hand-in-hand. It is not simply that the police are charged with protecting private property, but that the State, as a whole — comprised of “special bodies of armed men” (and women) — has the authority to kill citizens if the system of private ownership of the means of production, as a whole, is in any way challenged. La lucha continua ….