New York City, December 13 — Among the many hundreds of protests worldwide against racist police murder, I joined marches with my co-workers and PLP throughout the city, from Harlem to Foley Square. What does this amazing upsurge of antiracist, anti-police, and at least partly anti-capitalist feeling mean for revolutionary communists today? How can the Party seize this political-economic moment to mobilize more of our class for revolution?
We must be clear about our view of the police and the state. We begin from the vicious global competition among the rival big capitalists, heading towards a worldwide conflict among imperialists.  To prepare for that conflict and to emerge from the economic crisis, they are all cracking down on workers with harsh racist austerity, increasing the rate of exploitation and therefore arousing the anger of workers everywhere who are jobless or underpaid, with terrible schools, housing and healthcare. How does racist capitalism deal with the danger of working-class anger exploding, especially among the most exploited Black, brown, and immigrant workers?  Through the state. Through the police!
The State
Lenin in State and Revolution showed that the state is not a neutral force above society, but that every form of the state in history has expressed the domination over society of one social class. The state is a system of class rule. The ruling class relies on the unions, schools, media, churches, courts and politicians to control the workers on a daily basis. When these institutions fail to confine us in the prison of ideology, the rulers turn to repression: first the police, then the National Guard, and finally the full might of the armed forces are sent out to beat the workers into submission. At its brutal core, the state is simply composed of “special bodies of armed men” (Lenin) who guarantee class rule. As exploitation increases to win the capitalists’ competition against global rivals, the repressive force of the state will increasingly come to the fore, starting with its first line of defense, the police.
The Police
The first modern police force in what is now the United States, beginning in South Carolina in 1704, was the slave patrol. These forces hunted down and punished runaway and “defiant” slaves; they were a form of organized terror to deter revolts that might threaten plantation profits.
According to historian Diane McWhorter, the Ku Klux Klan formed alliances with governors’ administrations in states like Alabama and Mississippi. Throughout the South and Midwest, Klan members and local cops (often the same people) conspired to attack and murder civil rights activists.
The police target workers dangerous to capital, those who pose the most danger to the profit system when mobilized in groups: striking, organizing in the workplace, agitating in the neighborhoods and campuses, massing in the city centers.  
In a racist system the most dangerous workers are the super-exploited, communists, and militant workers. The crime-fighting aspect of police work is also targeted at dangerous workers, those who turn to antisocial crime, which endangers the established capitalists’ interests as well as disrupting workers’ lives. Crime is also a pretext for violent police patrols.
A key part of the police defense of capital is attack: they pre-empt worker upsurges by attacking first, terrorizing and intimidating the angry ones who might organize to fight back, especially Black, Latin, and immigrant workers. Armed police attack is backed up by the media, educators, clergy, courts and politicians who either defend police violence or counsel workers not to fight back. Violent, aggressive police patrols in Black and Latin areas (stop-and-frisk, broken windows), and police repression even of modest peaceful protest with shows of police power, embody this attack-first, pre-emptive strategy to instil fear in us. They would like us to back down without a fight so they “pre-frighten” us.
The Rule of Law
Laws, courts and prisons are annexes to state armed force, not the other way around; armed force is the foundation of the state, and the grand structure of laws and courts simply the hypocrite’s mask covering the state monopoly of violence. Their vaunted “rule of law” (used to justify the grand jury system and the whole authority of the police) is nothing but the rule of capitalists through their “special bodies of armed men,” masked and enabled by the laws capitalists themselves make through their bought-and-sold politicians, and administered by the courts the capitalists control through their political vetting of judges.
 The police and capitalists themselves break their own laws with impunity, backed by obedient courts. Drug laws enable racist mass incarceration (preventive detention for workers who might prove dangerous to capital). The body of law and bourgeois legal thought are also part of the ideological function of the state: war and torture in U.S. foreign policy are legitimate if a law can be written to cover them.
Racism: Essential to Capitalist Profit, Police, and State Power
Where the working class is multiracial as it is in the U.S., systemic racism marks both ideological and repressive state functions; many people are now up in arms against this racist character of the police and prison systems. U.S. capitalists’ state power is founded on racism because it is essential to their continued rule as well as to maximizing profit. Huge profit: hundreds of billions a year from the differences between the wages and services of Black and brown workers compared to white; between women and men workers; between native-born and immigrant workers. Capitalism will not give up this blood money and will use the full force of the state to hold on to it.
State racism functions to crush the revolt of the most exploited of our class, who are Black and Latin; it is meant to stop white workers from following the lead of Black and Latin rebels; and it hopes to split the fight-back of the working class along racial lines. The robber baron Jay Gould put it this way: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”  They wish!  But our mass marches are showing how we can come together against racism.
Police violence and mass imprisonment against Black and Latin workers, especially young men and women, is the cutting edge of this racist use of state power. The violence of the racist state at home carries over into the U.S. imperialists’ racist armies abroad as they gruesomely kill and torture workers who are most often Black and brown. These facts define a capitalism with its bloody roots in slavery. But all workers of whatever “race” must fight racism against any part of our class. Racism assaults and insults us all. We need the might of the whole class — led by the most oppressed workers — to smash racism, that bosses’ tool, forever.
Dialogue between Communist and Other Ideas in the Movement
The antiracist marchers of course have interesting and moving ideas of their own about racism, the police, and, more rarely but increasingly, capitalism and its state power. One noticeable thing in New York is the students and young professionals of all origins carrying eloquent statements by antiracist rebel writers like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. There is a ferment of ideas as well as of action in this upsurge, and a constant, wonderful self-assessment of aims and methods. In that spirit, we offer readers these introductory notes on the police and the state under capitalism. We want to engage you in dialogue about this, as our comrades are doing in Ferguson, Brooklyn, the Bay Area, and other sites of racist police killings.
Of course the police and state functions of capitalist society are more complex than this article can do justice to, and there are many apparent exceptions to these claims. We would only say here that the exceptions, when analyzed, prove the rule. De Blasio is already backing a police hunt for six protesters who dared to resist police attempts to arrest a marcher. He is also against penalties for the use of the chokehold, the technique used to kill black worker Eric Garner. There is liberal and there is fascist policing, but scratch a liberal and you will always find a fascist, when hypocritical ideology needs to give way to iron repression.
The Only Solution Is Communist Revolution
Ultimately justice for workers must mean smashing the capitalist state and abolishing the racist ruling class with armed revolution. The state will be in the hands of the  working class and the working class alone. We ask all antiracists to think about that challenging truth. Justice means ending all exploitation, not reforming a system whose whole purpose is to continue exploitation.
We invite you to study with us all these questions affecting our progress and success.  
We invite you to organize with PLP, a revolutionary communist party, to advance antiracism.  
We invite you to consider joining the struggle against racism and capitalism, to fight for an egalitarian world without racist exploitation, and, to that end, to join PLP and help build an effective, multiracial, international, revolutionary communist party.
Our Party, like you, is full of hope, because we have the strength of a long communist tradition behind us as well as the energy in the present of all those who revolt today, who say racism must be fought today. A different future is waiting to be built. Join us!