An estimated 26 million people took to the streets in moral and political outrage at the public lynching of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, the largest protest in U.S. history. They were met with terror by the police, National Guard, Homeland Security, and white supremacist militia.
A few days after his murder, George Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna, said that her “Daddy changed the world.”
The broad and sustained rebellion of people of all colors was a profound political impulse that rejects police terror and our rulers’ formula for power. Revolutionaries can strengthen and deepen that rejection. History shines a light on its revolutionary potential.
Legacy of Slavery
“Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died,” writes Historian Jill Lepore. Until 1865, approximately one in eight people in this country were enslaved as the property of Southern plantation owners. The history of slavery and genocide in the U.S. shaped how political power operates.
Although slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the plantation owners kept their land. The 1876 Presidential election was too close to call. The two ruling political parties made a compromise. The Republican Party got the Presidency. The Democratic Party got the Federal troops withdrawn from the South, giving the plantation owners free rein to murder, terrorize, immobilize, and forcibly exploit the freed people. Reconstruction, which was supposed to enforce the rights of the formerly enslaved people to get an education and exercise democracy, was violently overthrown.
Then came Jim Crow segregation and rule by legal and extra-legal terror. Raw cotton from the U.S., now harvested by formerly enslaved people, resumed its place on the expanding world market.
In this country, the relationship between classes in production, the economic base, included both capitalism and slavery. Southern slavery put the U.S. in a unique and powerful position on the world market. As Karl Marx noted, “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery, you have no cotton; without cotton, you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry.”
The political superstructure (the laws, police, and other organs of force) supported, protected and promoted the economic base of direct slavery and wage slavery. It secured U.S. prominence in world trade.
Before the Civil War, slave patrols returned escaped slaves to their masters. Vigilantes were deputized to kill the Native peoples. The Federal government forcibly dispossessed Native people of their land and developed railroads, mines, and plantations. That history shapes every aspect of power to this day.
Some might argue that the Civil War ended slavery, so the political superstructure that protected slavery no longer exists. Not so. Reconstruction’s overthrow showed all too well that slavery had not been excised from the organs of rule wielded by the U.S. ruling class. Formerly enslaved people had no political rights and no choice but to work on the plantations for next to nothing.
Slavery is no longer legal. But its stamp on how political power is exercised and the destructive effects on all of society are strong. Political power in America includes “divide and rule” and an ideology that accepts inequality. But it is more than that. The killing of Black people is historically ingrained in the political machinery of force and power in this country. It is part of how power is held by the ruling class.
Revolutionary Times
The state-supported overthrow of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow set the stage for the denial of civil rights, the “War on Crime,” the “War on Drugs,” the new Jim Crow, and countless victims of police terror. This power is also seen in voter suppression, disproportionate COVID deaths, under-funded schools, outsized homelessness, and an imperiled democracy and precarious economic conditions.
No American is safe from police terror as long as the African American people are not safe. No one is safe from the pandemic as long as the most impoverished workers die at a rate three times greater than everyone else.
The economic revolution that is replacing labor and throwing people into economic despair undermines the ideas and institutions used to hold society together. Society is polarizing economically and now, ideologically.
People cannot directly fight capitalism, the economic base of society. It’s just there; everywhere, but beyond reach. Struggle takes place within and against the political superstructure supporting and protecting that base.
The 2020 rebellion against police terror is a powerful political impulse aimed objectively, at the political superstructure that protects capitalism. It is part of the revolutionary struggle. Amid climate crisis, pandemic, and the abdication of our rulers of any responsibility for people’s lives or the Nature we are part of, the rebellion is a response to changes at society’s economic foundation.
These are revolutionary times. Millions of people are taking their outrage and life-and-death demands to the polls and to the streets. There are huge shifts in opinion and broad discussion of the problems of the day. These are revolutionary times because the vast majority of people need and demand changes that our society, as it is now constituted, cannot and will not respect.
Revolutionaries and revolutionary thought can make a powerful difference. We need to know why and how revolutions happen. In a nutshell, revolution is possible when it is necessary — when a fundamental change in how things are produced destabilizes core relationships, institutions, laws, and ideas that hold society together.
Today, our society is fighting out an economic revolution — the clash between the labor-replacing power of digital technology and a society organized around the buying and selling of labor power. Society needs to transform, and reorganize around its capacity to produce without exploitation, and to ensure a healthy and productive life for all.
This transformation must be fought out politically and ideologically. Society is beginning to do so. The political direction of the reconstruction of society today is not assured. It could continue in an unmistakably fascist direction that serves only a tiny class of exploiters and rulers. Or it could go forward to reorganize society in the interests of majority.
In Whose Interests?
The conclusion of the Civil War presented history with the opportunity to reorganize society around the interests of the freed people. The overthrow of Reconstruction ensured that did not happen. Critical moments bring that unfinished struggle to the surface. The police murder of George Floyd did just that.
Once again, the American people have an opportunity to reconstruct society. It will be on the basis of the interests of all who face police or vigilante terror, for all who have to make the choice between healthcare and housing, for all who have neither, for all who live in poverty and fear, for all “essential workers” who are treated as expendable workers. This time on the basis of the needs and rights of this new class of people whose labor and lives are becoming useless to the capitalist class and whose voices and basic human needs are ignored. That is the only way to fight for the future of humanity and Nature.
Revolutionaries today can equip the movement with a consciousness of its interests, with the understanding of how the U.S. ruling class holds its power, and with the confidence to play a role in reconstructing society. RC
January/February 2021. Vol31.Ed1
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction.
