After Charleston:

Which Side Are You On?

Updated July 3, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The cold-blooded massacre of nine Black people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina shocked and angered people across the entire country, and across the world.

Even by the bloody standards of American history—the whipping post, the lynch mob, the fire hoses and police dogs, the church bombings, the seemingly endless but always outrageous murder by cop—this massacre was an enormous crime. The murderer echoed a common theme and complaint of white men who feel they are losing their “entitlement.” He told his victims he was killing them because “You (Black people) rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go!”

The young racist who gunned down the Black people who had welcomed him to their church was steeped in the outlook of white supremacy that has long been a pillar of the “American way of life.” The enslavement of millions of Africans and their descendants, and the genocide of Native Americans and theft of their land were overwhelmingly the main basis for the great wealth accumulated at the foundation of the U.S. as a country. A strong sense of “white entitlement,” of the U.S. being a “white man’s country” developed on this basis, and became embedded not only in the culture and morality of the country, but in its legal codes, including the U.S. Constitution. Black people, Native Americans, and later Latinos and Asians, were regarded as “pariahs”—people outside protection of the law, outsiders treated with unpunished violence and contempt. This whole sense of “white entitlement,” and the reality of white privilege, has been part of the ideological glue that has held this country together, and continues at the core of the American mentality. (For a deeper understanding of this crucial point, see Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, by Bob Avakian.)

The oppression of Black people is at the very core of what makes the U.S. system of capitalist imperialism “tick.” Over hundreds of years, the forms of this oppression have changed somewhat, but the oppression, and the brutality with which it is enforced, have in fact deepened and become more embedded within and woven throughout the entire system. The massacre in Charleston is a gruesomely monstrous concentration of all that—it is not an “aberration,” not the work of a “deranged lone wolf.”

What Kind of System Does This?

Carl Dix said in a recent statement: “The blood of the nine people murdered in Charleston is on the hands of the rulers of this country. Whether this guy acted alone or not, he was acting within a climate that has been deliberately whipped up.” This is a climate that has repeatedly exonerated cops who murder unarmed Black people; that acquits a racist murderer like George Zimmerman; a climate that justifies the mass criminalization of generation after generation of Black and Latino youth.

After the Charleston massacre last week—and 150 years after the U.S.Civil War officially ended in 1865—leaders of both major political parties came to the “sudden realization” that the Confederate battle flag, which for decades has flown over the South Carolina capitol, as well as many other places, represents slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing white supremacy, and is despised by Black people (and many whites and people of other nationalities as well).

A tidal wave of rejection of the most hated and blatant symbol of white supremacy seems to be sweeping the country, and the South in particular. Deeply racist legislators, Tea Party fascists, and hard core upholders of “Southern heritage” (more accurately, white supremacists) have joined with many thousands of honest people who despise that flag and the enslavement and lynching it represents.

It would certainly be a positive development if this society were to be purged of the hated Confederate flag. It is also positive that thousands of people have rallied to demand the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol in Columbia. Demands have arisen to remove or change the names of hated symbols of white supremacy in dozens of other places. As far north as Minnesota, people have demanded that a lake named for a notorious Southern white supremacist be changed; on the campus of the University of Texas, a statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis has repeatedly been spray painted with “Black Lives Matter” in the past week.

All this must continue—but even more, people need to fight to get to the root of the problem of racism, white supremacy, and the ongoing oppression of Black people in this society.

What kind of society not only has refused to get rid of the flag of slavery, but in fact, for 150 years has enshrined enslavers and their symbols in places of “honor”? Even more fundamentally, what kind of society cannot do away with the kind of terror like that perpetrated by the Charleston killer, and even more, every day, by uniformed pigs who routinely inflict brutality and murder upon people?

This is a system that—since the days of slavery and every day since―has feasted upon the deep oppression, brutally enforced, of Black people. Wealth wrung from work done by Black people over centuries—as slaves, as share croppers, as low paid factory and shop workers—has been a pillar of the American empire. But now—due to changes in the globalized capitalist economy—this system has no place for millions of Black and Latino youth. It has no jobs for them, no future. It sends them to crumbling schools that are more like minimum detention centers; it has no social resources to allocate to train the youth for jobs, or to develop their communities. Why? Because there is no profit for the capitalists to be had in any of that.

What this system does have are brutalizing and murdering police, it has overcrowded prisons that can always accommodate a few more bodies; it has work camps and detention centers; it has crowded space in county lockups across the country where hundreds of thousands of people waste away time “awaiting trial.” It has racist killers in and out of official uniform—including people like Dylann Roof, George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn (the killer of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida), the armed vigilantes who patrol the Texas-Mexico border, and others. These people are engendered by a society steeped in a history and current reality of hatred and fear towards Black people, and contempt for Black lives. They are a product of this system, and often quite directly of powerful racist forces within it.

There has been almost a year now of massive protest against murder and brutality by police, beginning in Ferguson, then rippling across the country and bursting forth in New York, Cleveland, Oakland, Baltimore, and hundreds of cities and towns coast to coast. The phrase and hashtag “Black Lives Matter” has been used by millions of people from many arenas of society in protest—a rallying cry that has reverberated broadly. And there has been retaliation from the system: rallies of police and their supporters, massive repression against protesters, and ongoing murder and brutality perpetrated by the cops.

Basic questions about the nature and history of this system have been probed and debated. Why does murder by cop of Black and Latino people happen over and over and over? Why are the inner cities crumbling, the schools falling apart, and public housing being torn down? What kind of society and system do we live in, and what kind of society and system should we live in, what kind of society and system is possible? These are becoming mass questions in ways they haven’t for decades. This situation is dangerously “out of the box” for the ruling class.

A Critical Nodal Point

The ruling class of capitalist-imperialists has some understanding of this, and they are moving on it. Through all their mouthpieces and representatives, they are working mightily to try to confine the terms of the struggle now to mourning, to “healing,” and to reforming this system.

All representatives of the ruling class agree on the foundation of their approach towards the ongoing upsurge of protest and resistance that has rippled across this country, and towards the masses of Black and Latino youth in particular. It is a program of mass incarceration, brutal and murdering police, backed up by a legal system that supports nearly every atrocity these cops commit, no matter how outrageous and cruel. But differences within the ruling class about how to go about this are real, and they are deep. They aren’t going to be resolved through “bipartisan negotiations.” They are rooted in an intractable problem that cannot be resolved within the confines of this system.

Obama and people associated with the Democratic Party in particular have been working energetically to suppress and channel growing rebellion and resistance, especially among the basic people. The Democrats offer inclusion in the “political process” to a section of Black people, but have nothing but weak-ass charity for the masses of people who have been systematically impoverished and made jobless by this system. Their program seeks to keep people confined within electoral politics, and out of meaningful protest.

Obama and other Democratic Party leaders hold out the promise of some minor reforms in the face of the growing struggle against police brutality—while continuing to back these pigs to the hilt. In fact, Obama has made a huge point of speaking to large gatherings of police to tell them how much he supports them, even if the love affair is rather one-sided now. More to the point, murdering, brutalizing cops have received full support from the Obama administration, and his Department of Justice has given full backing to police murder after police murder.

As we wrote recently in Revolution, Obama’s program for the people “has three prongs. One, fraud. He is pushing programs he claims will help solve the problem of brutalizing, murdering police, but will actually do nothing of the kind. Two, repression. Obama is not only giving moral backing to cops, he is pushing programs that step up police power OVER and AGAINST the masses of people. Three, sugar-coated poison. He is using words of concern and promises of money, designed to mislead, confuse, and derail the struggle of the people.”

The eulogy Obama delivered in South Carolina has been described as one of the most powerful and passionate he has ever given. He even acknowledged some of the history and legacy of oppression Black people have faced. But he offered absolutely no answer to this, other than to trust in god, hope for grace, reconciliation, and most of all, trust in the American system, and “... striving to form a more perfect union.” This is the response of someone who wants to keep this system going—the very system that has inflicted so much of the horror and pain that Obama only touched on in his eulogy.

Others within the ruling class disagree with one or another component of the Obama program. For one thing, they demand across the board support for the police in whatever they do, and make the absurd and utterly false complaint that Obama and other leading Democrats undermine the cops. Among other things, these people have been working to limit the participation of Black people in the electoral process, and have been making major efforts to suppress voting rights of Black and other oppressed people.

For some in the ruling class, even the whiff of any concession or anything less than unquestioning support for every atrocity the police perpetrate on Black people is too much. Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and a leading Republican, said on a news show late last year: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everyone should hate the police”. Presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Obama has “inflamed racial tensions,” and that his alleged “vilification of law enforcement has been fundamentally wrong and it has hurt the minority community.”

One thing to note is that when someone like Cruz talks of “inflaming racial tensions,” he definitely is not talking about white cops who do things like jump on a car hood and fire over a dozen shots through the windshield at two Black people sitting inside. He doesn’t mean white cops choking a Black man to death on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Nothing like that. To Cruz and others of his ilk, “inflaming racial tensions” means raising, however mildly, that Black people are perhaps treated a bit unjustly in this society, that inequalities persist. This is considered “inflammatory,” or “playing the race card.” Cruz received campaign contributions from the head of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens; he later returned the money, but clearly this racist pig liked what he heard coming out of Cruz’s mouth.

These people represent a hard core within the U.S. ruling class, and the Republican Party in particular, that is, as Revolution has pointed out previously, a fascist force. This isn’t just a nasty name to call them. It isn’t an exaggeration. It is a scientific assessment of them, and most of all, of their program.

A major pillar of their whole outlook and program is straight-up white supremacy, whatever code words they may sometimes use to try to make that hateful outlook more palatable and “acceptable” to society as a whole. They are not going to let this go, or compromise on it, even if they make some (temporary) concessions on the Confederate flag. This emblem of slavery and oppression, as anyone with a functioning memory bank knows, was just fine with them until a few days ago.

A key expression of this supremacist outlook is unwavering support for any murderous or brutal act against Black people, especially committed by the police (and in many cases, racist vigilantes like George Zimmerman, the murderer of Trayvon Martin). They threateningly demand that everyone else better do the same.

Which Side Are You On?

In a society divided into classes, all political viewpoints have their ultimate source in how one class or another sees its interests. Classes are determined by their position in society’s relations of production—most especially (though not only), ownership and control over the means of production: the land, tools, machines, etc., through which things are made. In capitalist society, this means the capitalist-imperialists control huge chunks of the socially produced wealth, the middle strata with much less, and the masses of proletarians with nothing.

Seeking some kind of “middle ground” or reconciliation with the authorities and their supporters who uphold the endless onslaught of atrocities upon the people is the outlook and expresses the interests of people in the middle—people who oppose some of the abuses of the system but also think they have something to lose; people caught between the masses of basic people, and the handful of capitalist-imperialists in whose interests this system is run. This outlook can only lead to accommodating and excusing those very atrocities—and allowing them to continue. These views can change, among individuals and among large blocs of people, but they can never lead a movement to bring about fundamental change and rid society of its injustices.

The struggle bursting forth in this society over the past year is the kind of thing that doesn’t come along very often. The situation in this country has changed radically in the past year, in ways favorable for bringing forward the movement for revolution. People have repeatedly entered into the fight to stop the abuses of this system. They’ve had a lot of preconceptions, misconceptions, illusions, and false hopes. Many people are weighed down by outlooks that prevent them from getting at the truth systematically. Many are actively seeking ways to keep everything within the confines of the very system they are protesting. But people are repeatedly compelled to confront the workings of the system itself.

Many different forces are working on this situation. The ruling class, especially, is aggressively carrying out repression, and to an extent in some cases, extending “carrots” to try to pacify and contain people’s anger. But wave after wave of outpourings have spread throughout the country as people confront the reality of police murder, courts that exonerate cops, and hateful racist vigilante massacres of Black people.

Further fierce resistance and struggle is needed, along with calling on many others—millions of people—to take sides themselves, to get into the fight. This struggle has to go to a whole other level and aim to actually STOP these murders! At the same time, people need to continue to confront, and ask themselves and others: What is the character of this system that can’t get along without brutalizing and murdering Black people? Why is the outlook of white supremacy so deeply embedded in this society and what keeps it going? What is it really going to take to actually STOP these outrages once and for all?

Answers to these questions exist. To get them, watch the film REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion; A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN; and the film BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!; read Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy by Bob Avakian; and the special issue of Revolution, The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of This System and the Revolution We Need.

Carl Dix asked in a recent statement: “All this faces us all with an urgent question: Which side are you on? Are you on the side of the savage oppression and brutality this system enforces on Black people? Or do you stand against these kinds of horrors?” What is really needed now is for people—masses of people—to take sides, and get out into the fight. What’s most needed is fierce struggle against the entire onslaught upon Black people perpetrated by the authorities and by racist vigilantes.

 

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