Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Justice” Department report on the racism of Ferguson’s cops and courts is a cynical ruling-class effort to pacify infuriated workers. The report was released the same day it was announced that Holder’s department would not press federal charges against killer cop Darren Wilson for the assassination of Mike Brown. Four days later, Barack Obama led an equally cynical commemoration of the 1965 antiracist struggle in Selma, Alabama.
The bosses’ frantic maneuvers in Missouri and Alabama were reminiscent of Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, which muted what remained of a mass anti-war movement against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In New York City, meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio is playing a racist shell game. He’s come out against “stop-and-frisk” while “quality-of-life” arrests have soared. He’s granted Muslim students two public school holidays while the NYPD spies on their parents — the Muslim working class.
As calls mount for U.S. ground troops to battle the Islamic State in Iraq and occupy Afghanistan indefinitely, liberal politicians are leading the charge for racist, genocidal U.S. imperialism. Since the first Gulf War was launched in 1990, the U.S. bosses’ program to protect their Middle East oil fields has been in high gear. But the rulers also know that a mass conscript army would be significantly more effective than the current “all-volunteer” force, an unstable mix of alienated Black and Latin enlisted women and men and Christian fundamentalist officers. Racism is alive and well in the post-9/11 U.S. fighting force.
History of Fightback
The limited reform successes of the Civil Rights Movement were made possible by a global anti-colonialist movement in Africa and Asia after World War II. As part of its Cold War offensive against the Soviet Union, the U.S. ruling class needed to put on an anti-racist charade. In the face of persistent, militant organizing and mass demonstrations, the federal government desegregated of the U.S. military in 1946, enacted Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 (to supposedly desegregate public schools), and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
This original civil rights movement dated from before World War II. It attacked lynching and segregation and was led on a national scale by the old communist movement. But the old movement made a major error when it suspended sharp anti-racist struggle in the U.S., in line with the Moscow leadership’s devastating turn away from armed struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and toward a “united front against fascism..
Victory over the German and Japanese fascists was won over the dead bodies of tens of millions in communist-led Russia and China. But within the U.S., the united front meant abandonment of dedicated anti-racist fighters to the tender mercies of the segregationists and their lynch mobs. Coupled with a timid response to the anti-communist purges known as McCarthyism, this retreat took a huge toll. Bereft of fighting communist leadership, the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties ultimately became a toothless reform movement. It would exhaust itself searching to reform the un-fixable.
Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s. With the revisionist Soviet Union imploding, the U.S. ruling class no longer had to represent itself as a “democratic” alternative, either at home or around the globe. As their economy lost ground to imperialist rivals, U.S. bosses intensified their exploitation and brutal oppression of U.S. workers. The officially sanctioned, everyday racist policies in Ferguson are just one illustration of the gutter racism in the age of Obama.
Bosses Desperate to Pacify Angry Workers
The Justice Department’s report is a revelatory document for millions of anti-racist white workers and youth who could not have imagined how racist policing suffocates Black neighborhoods. For the Black workers, there may be a sense of vindication. Even the federal government, it seems, can no longer deny the realities of racism.
Last summer, Obama’s pleas to “keep it peaceful” (read: don’t upset the status quo) on primetime TV failed to stop the anti-racist movement sparked by the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. When KKKop Panteleo walked free last December, after choking Garner to death on videotape, mass anger erupted into demonstrations in over a hundred cities. The old-guard leadership of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson was unable to corral the masses into the electoral dead end of the Democratic Party. Chants of “Eric Garner, Mike Brown — shut this racist system down!” and “NYPD, KKK, how many kids have you killed today?” resonated among hundreds of thousands of marchers who blocked traffic and subjected themselves to mass arrest.
The U.S. ruling class has a problem. The Black and Latin workers and youth who have taken to the streets are the very same people the bosses need to fill their military enlistment quotas.
The U.S. ruling class has been at it for a hundred years and more, but they still don’t have it figured out. Their weaknesses are our opportunities. The twentieth century taught us that workers will fight for communism. Now in the twenty-first century, we must carry the fight to the finish — from revolution to the final victory of communism. Join PLP!