The Dallas shooting (the lone gunman who, exasperated by the constant murder of black people by the police, shot 5 police officers) reveals that there are many issues here to reflect upon.
First of all, as we have stated more than once in our newspaper over the past months, referring to the cold-blooded murders by the US forces of repression, the problem is not one of race but of class. Racism is a tool that the ruling class has always used to divide and weaken the proletariat, setting large sectors of the population one against the other. This has happened ever since the abolition of slavery after the American Civil War (1861-1865): the relentless development of capitalism and the creation of a national market needed a scapegoat for social frustration, thus dividing and ruling: white workers against black workers, but also “native” workers against immigrant workers, the white, working-class aristocracy against the “poor whites” and so on. To cite another example, the “divide and rule” carried forward by the British ruling class within the English working classes against the Irish proletariat was no different: we only need read the pages that Marx and Engels devoted to this issue, insisting that the English working class could only have carried out its revolutionary role by freeing itself from anti-Irish prejudice and taking up arms against capital as a single proletarian front united in the struggle. Racism is one of capitalism’s poisonous by-products and this is why we declare openly, using a paraphrase, that “those who don’t want to talk about capitalism, can’t talk about racism”!
But the Dallas shooting also tells us (and we are once again repeating something we have been saying for months) that the social situation in the US is deteriorating rapidly, despite all the optimistic proclamations of “economic recovery” and the sickening rhetoric swamping public opinion from an election campaign that is increasingly becoming a useless and putrid democratic funfair. The “social inequalities” (the coy expression used by sociologists to avoid saying “class fractures”) are becoming clearer and clearer and inevitably hit the more exposed strata of society, that have always been used as scapegoats. The city ghettos, large and small, but also the “poor white” neighbourhoods and communities and those of more or less recent immigrant proletarians (in the states of the south-west the more or less clandestine immigrants from Central and South America live and work in inhuman conditions) are tragic receptacles of poverty, filled with an anger that has no outlet, except in desperate, individual action.
Faithful to our tradition as communists, we do not condemn these acts. However, we once more repeat loud and clear that this social deterioration (which is not a pathology of capitalist society but the very physiology of it) is destined to grow even keener, preparing the ground for many other tragedies; that the need for self-defence must once again be recovered on a daily basis in every demonstration and on every occasion for struggle; that it is through the radicalisation of positions and the practical reaffirmation of revolutionary, anti-patriotic and anti-nationalist defeatism, that the issue of power must again be posed; that, faced with all this, the need for the revolutionary party, able to unite the proletarian classes beyond confines of origin, language and colour, is felt even more keenly. The true battle against racism takes place during proletarian struggles, in the picket lines and in the block on goods and production, when the economic struggle in defence of living and working conditions becomes the training ground and premise for revolutionary political battle.
The answer certainly will not come from petit-bourgeois, reformist and pacifist formations, like the much celebrated “Black Lives Matter”, which proposes (as can be seen on their website) to affirm and lay claim to “the Black folks’ contributions to this society”! “This society”, which is grounded on capital, must be destroyed and in order to destroy it, the mobilisation of a united proletarian class guided by its revolutionary party is needed. This is what we are working towards, well aware that we are a minority force but also that there is no other way out of the horror – of war and misery, racism and exploitation, oppression and repression – of “this society”.
July 2016
Also see, in “The Internationalist”, n.3/2016:
“From the USA: Ferguson (Missouri), Again”
“From the Rebel Ghetto of Baltimore, Let the Battle Cry Again Be: ‘Workingmen of All Countries, Unite!’”
Recent articles on the social situation in the United States, published in “il programma comunista”:
“USA: Bolle sociali (e non solo finanziarie) in vista”, no.1/2015
“USA: La guerra in casa”, no.2/2015
“Dal ghetto in rivolta di Baltimora, il grido torni a essere 'Proletari di tutto il mondo, unitevi!'”, no.3/2015
“Di nuovo Ferguson (Missouri)”, no.5/2015
International Communist Party