The Ferguson Uprising Lights the Way

“It doesn’t matter that the dude has a black face,They’re all cops.”
-Protester speaking to a reporter from the Guardian
The people of Ferguson: the fighters, the looters, the arsonists. Those branded “criminals” have through their brave intervention created a new political situation, new possibilities for asserting our collective power.
To strike back at the front line solders of a genocide, to take back the smallest fraction of what’s been stolen from you over centuries of chattel slavery and wage labor: bourgeois ideology call this crime, but it is not crime.
It is vital. It is necessary. It is justice.
The true criminals are the architects and apologists of the white supremacist capitalist order, the order which murders its victims unflinchingly, whether it be be blatantly with bullets and batons, or subtly and insidiously with medical negligence, prison time and extreme deprivation. The true criminals are the Jay Nixons, Barack Obamas, Dwight Joneses , Al Sharptons, they are are every cop who justifies his brutality by telling himself “it’s just a job”, every “community activist” who works to smother the justified hatred of the laboring masses with cries for phony peace and lopsided dialogues.
Sooner or later, the people will settle accounts.
Ever since Reconstruction people have hoped to reform the racism out of this state. Ever since Reconstruction it has betrayed those hopes and smothered them in blood.
Lobbying does not make history. A vigil does not make history. The rebellious violence of the masses does . For the new to emerge the old must be destroyed. So long as our action remains straight-jacketed within the legal order of the capitalist state we can only mark time in the bondage of our powerlessness.
It is precisely and only when the masses violate this legal order, the moment when we match the violence of the state with our own that new historical possibilities begin to emerge. This is what the people of Ferguson have given us leaving us with both the responsibility of taking these possibilities in hand, and the genuine hope of building on this new situation.
The spontaneous violence of the masses is excellent, but organized it is even better. So long as there is oppression there will be resistance.
Our job is to learn from this resistance, to organize it, and to escalate it, so that the riots of today may become the revolutionary war of tomorrow. The present situation is full of potential but this potential may only be realized on the basis of our coming together,on the strength our organization, coordination and discipline.
Maoist Communist Group – Richmond Branch
August 2014