The Communist Caucus—Bay Area offers this collective statement of solidarity with all participants in the uprising against white supremacy and the police state.

6/12/2020

We stand with everyone taking the streets after the police executions of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, David McAtee, and countless other Black and Brown people. History shows us that we cannot simply ask for justice from a white-supremacist police state. Justice must be seized against the will of the racist police and those in power. 

This is no easy task. The police have decades of militarization and the will of the state behind them. But we have something they don’t—numbers. From Oakland to Philly, DC to Brooklyn, the last week is a reminder that numbers can make the power of the state irrelevant. In the words of Chairman Fred Hampton, “The people have the power; it belongs to the people.”

George Floyd’s death was the sadistic culmination of racial capitalism’s contradictions. The words of the great Black intellectual and Communist Party member, W.E.B. Du Bois, reverberate in our present: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” In the twenty-first century, the color-line still serves capitalist power. It suppresses Black freedom and prevents the proletarian solidarity required to demolish the color-line for good. While chattel slavery is no more and segregation is nominally illegal, police continue to enforce Black suppression.

Today, as ever, police maintain racialized boundaries in everyday life. Breonna Taylor, Oscar Grant, and the thousands of other Black people murdered by police are present in today’s uprising against the police state. Let’s be clear: this uprising is not reducible to calls for legalistic justice or the isolated arrests of killer cops. No, this uprising is about banishing the police from our lives forever. Considering how military techniques developed abroad are used to train US police officers, the ties between US policing and US imperialism run deep. It’s no wonder that the protests against George Floyd’s murder have gone global.

As communists, we must supersede liberal rhetoric and support the most militant elements of the movement. Our numbers in the streets overwhelm the police. But our true power is in our potential to disrupt business as usual. Movements don’t succeed without this leverage. Liberal ideology, in its desire to preserve property and the political status quo, seeks to diminish our ability to force change, redirecting working class unrest into toothless campaigns. Just as the movement finally forces discussions on long-standing negligence for Black working-class life, liberals promote hand-wringing over “looters” and property destruction. 

What happens when liberal ideas prevail? Parts of the movement are safely integrated into the state or into the Democratic Party, while others are subjected to violent domination by the state’s militarized police. To cultivate power that can check—and ultimately overcome—the state, we must reject such liberal divisions—peaceful protestors versus violent rioters; citizens versus criminals; strategy versus ignorance. 

We call on socialists of all tendencies to adjust ongoing work to bolster the current uprising and advance the cause of police abolition. As liberals rush in to co-opt and diffuse Black grievances, we must do all we can to widen and sustain the movement beyond its current form. Hundreds of thousands of people are facing down police violence in the streets, tearing down racist monuments, and forming new solidarities with a single horizon in mind: police abolition. Any lesser goal is cowardly and wrongheaded. 

No matter the content of our work—labor organizing, tenant organizing, education, mutual aid—we all have the opportunity to incorporate critical anti-police work into our practice. As with the removal of the police from the AFL-CIO, school contracts, and college campuses, we must actualize material and practical forms of anti-racist solidarity.

We can only dissolve the enduring color-line by breaking apart the thin blue line. Today, many are beginning to recognize the relationship between the police and the legacy of racial domination long understood by Black and Brown people. It could be that today’s uprising is the Black wedge that finally breaks apart the thin blue line. Let’s make sure we’re on the right side of the fight.