Millions of us have made it clear that we don’t believe the American people become safer the more police there are. In fact, a core message of the 2020 Rebellion that erupted after the murder of George Floyd is that putting more police on the streets produces more beatings and killings. This awareness has now spawned a national struggle to get cities and communities to pull funding from local police departments, school districts, and colleges, which some have agreed to at least partially do.
This struggle against police power is the most intense battlefront in an expanding political war against the fascism that is step-by-step being imposed on America. Other battles will arise, such as on June 1st, when President Trump threatened to use the Army against protesters during the Rebellion. He sparked a torrent of dissent from thousands of people from all walks of life, including 89 current and retired generals and past leaders of the CIA. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen, former commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, told the press “the last thing the country needs — and, frankly, the U.S. military needs — is the appearance of U.S. soldiers carrying out the president’s intent by descending on American citizens.”
But it is a dangerous mistake to believe those who once authorized murderous invasions and tortures suddenly become anti-fascists when they disagree with Trump. Their real motivation was revealed when the former chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey said he opposed Trump’s threat because “we ask parents across the country to share their sons and daughters with us for a period of military service and were we to lose the trust and confidence of the American people, it would make sustaining that all-volunteer force more than difficult.” Dempsey knows many soldiers have seen the same poverty and brutal police as the protesters and might rebel against attacking them without cause.
Understanding the nature of today’s fascism is essential if we are to unmask those who claim to be against it, yet help consolidate it. We aren’t facing the fascism born in Italy as World War I and the Great Depression disrupted the operation of industrial capitalism in many countries. That fascism was a way to renew the capitalist system by putting the most powerful companies in charge of various industries, limiting competition and workers’ rights. Germany’s fascist Nazi government claimed this was necessary because “enemies within” had sabotaged the economy, so they persecuted religious minorities such as Jews, various dark-skinned peoples, and working class fighters such as the communists.
Most Americans still think of fascism as being some form of Nazism. The crisis addressed by today’s fascism is that as electronic technology replaces millions of workers in every industry, it demolishes the very foundation of capitalism. Without jobs, workers cannot buy the mountain of goods that robotics can produce, nor provide payroll deductions for the taxes and health care that are crucial to the functioning of the system. The ruling class realizes they cannot reverse technology and are beginning to realize that even fascism cannot save the capitalist system. They are merging the biggest corporations and the government, to secure enormous private concentrations of wealth as the current system breaks down.
As electronic production pushes workers out of every industry, elites must plan how to control this growing new class during the coming downturns in the national economy. That is why both Republican and Democratic politicians advocate that limits on abusive police practices be accompanied by increased federal control over local police and why Democratic-controlled city governments have permitted the highest number of killings by police. It is clear that, although it is important to defeat Trump in November, that by itself will not end police violence or the threat of fascism.
The new class needs to know that the explosive growth of poverty is behind the rise in police brutality. They need to know that the police are one part of a fascist system that’s being prepared to deal with them and that the broadest, most effective anti-fascist force is a united struggle to make the government guarantee everyone’s basic needs like healthy food, adequate housing, health care, and free education. Such struggles will reveal who their enemies are in both political parties, as well as who their class sisters and brothers of all colors are. Fighting concretely for each of these needs also exposes who controls the wealth of society and prevents it from being made available for its people.
Being blocked by the ruling class’ private hoarding of what the people have produced, and their refusal to use this socially produced wealth to relieve the growing suffering opens the fighters to thinking about new solutions. Revolutionaries can play an important role by introducing a vision of the collective use of this social wealth, once it is freed from private ownership and control.
Some might react by linking this vision to words rooted in their spiritual or cultural traditions. Some might link it to the scientific Meriam-Webster definition of “communism: a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed.” If we can imagine a society without murderous police, and we can, then we can imagine a society where the most powerful technology belongs to and is used to provide enough medical masks, food, and housing for everyone, whether they have a job or not.
July/August 2020. vol.30. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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