Americans are suffering almost 500,000 new coronavirus infections per day, with over 100,000 being hospitalized, and a death rate over 1/3 higher than at last winter’s peak. Federal government leaders claim their leadership was successfully turning the tide against the pandemic but was undermined first by conservatives rejecting necessary actions like vaccinations and masks, and then by the new Omicron variant. However, apart from that, government at all levels failed to require the maximum protection of people, and we must openly state why.
The ruling class is abandoning the neediest Americans. With more corporations using robotics and Artificial Intelligence, fewer humans are needed for production and profit-making. They fall into the new class that cannot pay for adequate housing, food, or other necessities, and need government help. Instead, thousands of this class are dying because the government refused to provide enough health care resources and policies guaranteeing vaccination, masking, distancing, etc. for that class. Simultaneously, elites are also re-organizing their system of policing and unleashing new vigilante forces, all in preparation for launching deadly confrontations with the growing new class.
While COVID-19 was sweeping through the society, millions were marching in the streets against this growing fascist threat. They cheered the life sentences given to three Georgia vigilantes who shotgunned Ahmaud Arbery for “suspicious jogging”, and the convictions of killer cops in Oklahoma and Missouri. Yet, in Wisconsin, Kyle Rittenhouse was freed despite killing two and gravely wounding another as they protested murderous police.
We’re told that these contrasting verdicts prove that our enemy isn’t a bad legal system, just bad individual jurors and judges. Actually, it only reflects the contradictory process by which ever more fascist methods of control are implemented, while people use their remaining rights to fight in the courts and the streets. As the discarded millions organize to demand their government assist them, this ruling class must prepare more aggressive, fascist methods to control those who must fight to survive. That repression will increasingly spill out to greater sections of society.
So, police continue to kill the innocent. And more private citizens are taking up the violence and killings modeled by police. The hunting and murdering of Ahmaud Arbery reflected that development, and Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of three protestors took it to a higher level. The fact of this acquittal coming on the heels of the mighty George Floyd Rebellion reveals its counter-revolutionary political essence. It gives significant encouragement to the fascist mass base that’s being developed.
A positive verdict, or a new regulation banning chokeholds, cannot stop the ongoing development of fascism. The State has to bring individual police under tighter, more militarized control in preparation for defending the ruling class’ private property from the growing class of displaced people who have no choice but to demand they be provided health care, housing, food, and other basic needs. New regulations can play a part in this militarization.
Police murder interconnects class and color. Police generally kill those who do the lowest-paid jobs and those pushed out of the jobs economy, and since a high proportion of African Americans are from those sectors, police killings of Blacks are usually also a part of broader class violence. The two Oklahoma cops tortured a white man to death by tasering him 50 times. Rittenhouse shot three whites as they fought for unity of all victims of police. These were acts of class war, and in the Wisconsin acquittal elements of the State openly played a partisan role in that war.
The class that’s being dispossessed of any stable role in the new economy will increasingly mobilize to fight for its protection from pandemics and for its other needs, and so will increasingly be repressed, becoming a rallying point for those fighting to overcome the drive toward more fascism. Revolutionaries must use these developments to help them see that robotic production can and should be taken away from the ruling class to become public property that helps provide resources to protect the public’s health from both viruses and killer cops.
Published: January 15, 2022
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