“It is the system itself that is incapable of producing freedom for the twenty-two million Afro-Americans. Just like a chicken can't lay a duck egg, because the system of the chicken isn't constructed in the way to produce a duck egg. And just as that chicken system can't produce, is not capable of producing, a duck egg, the political and economic system of this country is absolutely incapable of producing freedom and justice and equality and human dignity for the twenty-two million Afro-Americans.”
—Malcolm X
Chesa Boudin was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2020, part of a wave of progressive DA's who aimed to reform mass incarceration and police repression. He was removed through a recall election on June 7 of this year. Boudin tried to end cash bail, to stop prosecuting children as adults, and he moved to allow victims of police brutality to file for medical compensation. As modest as these and other attempts at reform were, Boudin was deemed intolerable by the power structure, not just the Republi-fascists but leading Democrats as well. Former San Francisco Mayor and State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a major player in the California Democratic Party, said Boudin may have been “a warrior for the downtrodden” but “He’s certainly not a prosecutor.” Boudin’s recall is being celebrated by mouthpieces for the dominant forces in the Democratic Party as demonstrating “the debacle of urban left-wing politics.”
In reality, Boudin’s recall demonstrates the debacle of, as Malcolm X put it, trying to produce a duck egg from a chicken. In RACIAL OPPRESSION CAN BE ENDED—BUT NOT UNDER THIS SYSTEM, in the spirit of and going beyond Malcolm X’s quote, Bob Avakian (BA) takes as an example and focuses on the oppression of Black people to dig deeply into why trying to make any fundamental change to this system cannot work:
The continuing terror and murder carried out by the police particularly against Black people (as well as Latinos and Native Americans) is not fundamentally because the police are racist—although, speaking of the police overall, that is certainly true. The fact that the police are racist is itself an expression and a function of the fact that terror and murder against Black people (and other people of color) is required by this system—is necessary in order to maintain the “order” of this all-around oppressive system—and this would be much more difficult to carry out if the police were not racist.
And, that this is because
from the beginning of this country, white supremacy has been poured into the foundation and built into the institutions and the ongoing functioning of this system. Specifically with regard to Black people, the centuries of oppression they have suffered—from slavery days to the days of Jim Crow segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror, to the present time, with the continuing systematic discrimination against Black people, in every part of society (employment, housing, education, health care, and on and on)—all this has resulted in a situation where masses of Black people today, and in particular youth, have been robbed of a means for a decent life, with many maintained in conditions of desperate poverty and deprivation. This, again, is not simply because those who are in the seats of power and deciding government policy are racist (though that is true of most of them). It is fundamentally because of the nature of the system itself and the historically-evolved requirements and dynamics of this system of capitalism-imperialism.