Police and vigilante murders of innocent people recently produced clashing verdicts, leading some to conclude that we don’t face a bad legal system, only bad individual judges, and jurors. The three vigilantes who killed Ahmaud Arbery for “suspicious jogging” in their Georgia neighborhood and the two Oklahoma cops who tortured Jared Lakey to death with a taser were found guilty of murder. On the other hand, a jury freed Wisconsin vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse despite killing two and gravely wounding another during a protest against police violence.
A national struggle is underway. Some forces are promoting ever more fascist methods of control, and others are using their remaining rights to mobilize resistance to that in the courts and the streets.
Though each side has won some individual cases, the fascist drive rolls on because it is serving the class that rules the country. These elites understand a growing mass of people are unnecessary to the electronic, digital economy their class owns and controls. As those discarded millions raise demands for their government to assist them, the ruling class must foster more aggressive methods of control to prevent any threat to their monopolization of society’s wealth.
Such fascist repression increasingly spills out to broader sections of society. As police continue to kill the innocent, some white supremacist and vigilante groupings are increasingly taking up the violence and killings they modeled. The hunt for and murder of Ahmaud Arbery reflect that development, and Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of three protestors took it to a higher level. His acquittal coming on the heels of the George Floyd Rebellion reveals its counter-revolutionary political essence: encouragement to the developing fascist mass base.
Better verdicts, or regulations banning chokeholds and other abusive police practices, will not end the ongoing development of fascism. The ruling class needs its State to prepare the police for the inevitable coming challenges to its system of private property. New regulations can help them develop more disciplined, militarized police forces for the developing class war.
Police violence interconnects class and color. Police generally kill working-class people, especially those being displaced from any stable place in the economy. Those sectors comprise an exceptionally high proportion of African Americans, so when police violence targets Blacks, it is also a central part of their class violence. When Oklahoma cops tortured a white man to death by tasering him over 50 times, and Rittenhouse shot three whites fighting brutal police, those were also acts of class war. In the Rittenhouse acquittal, the State openly played a partisan role.
The small class atop American society is guilty of hoarding obscene amounts of wealth and property while millions go sick, hungry, and unhoused. It is guilty of using cops, courts, and vigilantes to maintain such a system. The developing new class whose struggle constitutes a program to provide for all the people’s needs cannot co-exist with that ruling class or its system. As the growing numbers of this new class gain that understanding, they will empower themselves to pass judgment on their abusers and create a system using social wealth for the needs of the many. RC
January/February 2022. Vol32.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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