The brutality of the Minneapolis cop is not an isolated example of a fanatical, psychopathic pig running amok… It is a “spontaneous” expression of the main “institutional” function of the contemporary bourgeois and imperialist State: surveillance, punishment, repression, control of any “suspicious” behavior, at first individual (the violation or even mere intention to violate private property in its mean form of possessing goods to be sold), but potentially and in perspective, collective and social (the overthrowing of forms of production that will abolish the private appropriation of wealth produced by the collective work of wage workers all over the world). This is a well-known fact to the workers who struggle every day for their wage, for their living and working conditions, against and outside the rules established by bourgeois “law”, just as it is well-known to the proletarian and proletarianized masses in areas where war breaks out and rages, where imperialist exploitation steals and destroys mercilessly.
We communists fully support the proletarians, sub-proletarians and all those who can no longer stand the violence of the bourgeois State and are now demonstrating their anger and indignation towards the symbols of police oppression in working-class neighbourhoods; and we are certainly not surprised or indignant if, in the general confusion, shops, stores and pawnshops are taken by storm as very material symbols of the dictatorship of money and commodities over human life.
We know quite well that these revolts are only a symptom of the revolutionary potential of our class and, at the same time, that, despite their duration and intensity, they are destined to be suffocated and reabsorbed through our blood sacrifices.
But these revolts (which the mass media, the organs and expression of the bourgeoisie, insist on downsizing as “protests against racism and inequality”, thus condemning any form that goes beyond the complaining and whining of the poor devils) must be a lesson and remind proletarians all over the world that the knot to be untied is that of power: rebelling or burning police stations is not sufficient and it is not enough to seize goods from the stores or money from the banks and the pawnshops.
Today American proletarians are obliged to respond with force to police abuse and do well to retaliate blow by blow to the attacks, just as they do well to respond blow by blow to the “white supremacist” scoundrels, demonstrating by the practice of mutual defence that the proletariat is a single class: whoever touches one of us touches us all.
Nevertheless, a further step is needed: it is essential to realize that cops and fascists are merely the tools of the real enemy, the bourgeois and imperialist State – also and in particular the enemy when it sets itself up as a “democratic” mediator, the peaceful and generous supplier of aid.
Rebellion is sacrosanct, self-defence is necessary: but they are not enough. From the working-class neighbourhoods there has to be a return of the awareness and certainty that it is necessary not only to fight against power but to seize power: to demolish bourgeois power and replace it with the power of wage workers alone. It is not enough to seize by force the commodities produced by the expropriation of our work: we must destroy the system that steals our work and existence and re-organize every aspect of social life by means of the communist revolution. The rebellion is a forced explosion. But the revolution is a necessity that requires organization, a programme, clear ideas and the practice of collective work: in simple terms, the revolution needs a party to direct it.
The struggling proletariat, the rebellious proletariat, must organize with and in the communist party.
30/5/2020
(a leaflet distributed on various occasions)
International Communist Party