The umpteenth brutal murder, in early January, of the young African-American Tire Nichols at the hands of the US police, this time in Memphis (Tennessee), tragically demonstrates what we have never ceased to reiterate, year after year, decade after decade. Racism is not a "color" issue, but a class issue: as is known, the five uniformed murderers are African-Americans like their victim. Other chickens come home to roost: the police, the "forces of order", are the armed wing of the State, and the State is the armed wing of Capital – this is the true chain of command!
When George Floyd and, shortly after, Breonna Taylor and other African-Americans were killed in very similar circumstances three years ago, protests and riots broke out across the country, and the attention of the media and public opinion focused on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which had been present on the US scene for about ten years. Back then, as we see from reading articles already published by our press in the mid-60s, we devoted quite a lot of space to racism in the USA and to the so-called "black question", precisely demonstrating its class matrix.
We also denounced the approach of organizations such as BLM, which, with a substantially reformist approach, entirely internal to the system and the institutions, have the role of allowing the revolt of the African-American proletarians and sub-proletarians to simmer down by channeling their just anger into a democratic perspective, fully functional to maintaining the status quo. It is no coincidence that, after the assassination of Nichols in Memphis, the protests around the country have been mild, almost half-hearted, pervaded by a tearful and resigned sense of impotence.
Other chickens are coming home to roost: the society of Capital is in a state of permanent war, not only between imperialist factions and interests on an inevitable collision course, but also and above all against the proletariat and its potential global threat: a daily war, conducted in the workplace, in the social sphere, in defensive struggles, as well as on the battlefields. It is time to realize this and to make a clean sweep of any illusion of a peaceful coexistence between classes, based on the rhetoric of the "best of all possible worlds". Only then will the proletarian threat become real rather than just potential. We shall never cease to work for it.
January 30, 2023
P.S.: The slaughter continues. A few days after the murder of Nichols, on February 1, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the cops shot and killed Anthony Lowe, a 36-year-old African-American man with no legs and in a wheelchair. Apparently the cops felt threatened, because he had a knife...