Ya para las ocho esta noche, 600 ó 700 personas se habían juntado delante de la comisaría de policías en la calle Florissant Sur, para saber por fin, después de 108 días de angustia e indignación, si iban a acusar formalmente de homicidio a Darren Wilson
, el policía que asesinó a Mike Brown el 9 de agosto. Los
presentes ya ardían de rabia, coreando “¿Qué deberíamos hacer? ¡Cerrar
por completo esta porquería!”, “¡Manos arriba! ¡No disparen!”, “¡Que
acusen, condenen y manden a la cárcel al policía asesino! ¡Todo el
maldito sistema es culpable, carajo!” Se paraban junto a las vallas de
metal que les separaban de los policías marranos que estaban guardando
la comisaría, y gritaban: “¡Su placa no me vale ni carajo esta noche!”La mayoría de las personas con quienes hablé tenía el sentido de que el sistema no iba a acusar a Wilson, pero me parecía que todos tenían nudos en el estómago, pues la tensión se respiraba en el ambiente. (Anoche una mujer negra me dijo que si no acusaran a Wilson, ya no habría ningún futuro para sus seis hijos en Estados Unidos.) La rueda de prensa del fiscal empezó a las 8 p.m. Pero, tras 108 días, no iban a anunciar la decisión sin más. Tenían que atormentar a las personas que esperaban afuera, en temperaturas que casi llegaban a cero, con 30 minutos de pura palabrería antes de escupir la decisión: ¡ninguna acusación!
Fue como una patada al estómago. La furia repercutía en cadena en la multitud. La gente coreaba
, gritaba, se abalanzó contra la barricada policial y la tumbó. Parecía que todos se movían en seis direcciones a la vez.Anteriormente durante el día, les escuché al gobernador Nixon de Misuri y al alcalde de San Luis, que afirmaron que iban a proteger el derecho de protesta de las personas. Con tal de que no hubiera daños a propiedad ajena, iban a dejar que las personas tomaran las calles y hasta bloquearan el tránsito. ¡Mentira! Las personas que se fueron marchando por la calle se toparon con varios enormes vehículos antimotines. Acaso hubo una hora de protesta cuando
los
perros policías les ordenaron salir de las calles y dejar de tirar
objetos, que se trataba de una reunión ilegal. Varios centenares de
personas se quedaban parados ahí, desafiantes. Luego la policía comenzó a
lanzar gas lacrimógeno y las personas se dispersaron de la zona de la
comisaría. Pero pronto después se reagruparon y regresaron para tomar su
lugar frente a los policías blindados.Yo estaba sacando fotos y filmando. Una vez más llegaron las descargas de gas lacrimógeno, como luces bengalas tiradas entre la muchedumbre, como una zona de guerra. En algún momento me quedé atrapado en una nube de gas; ésta tenía un hedor acre, le hace arder los ojos y se le atraganta, haciéndole sentir que no va a poder respirar. Así que para las 9:30 pm, apenas una hora después del anuncio, la policía había expulsado de la zona a la mayoría de nosotros, aunque unas 100 personas se quedaban.
Pero cuando nos trasladamos a la Florissant Oeste, cerca de los edificios Canfield donde Mike Brown vivió y fue asesinado, vimos a centenares, y probablemente más de mil personas, que estaban llegando a pie y en carro, tomando las calles y dando rienda suelta a su furia. Una persona que vive aquí me dijo que le recordaba las primeras noches después del asesinato de Mike. A estas personas también la policía las atacó y dentro de poco
toda la calle olía a gas lacrimógeno.Cuando salimos, nos enteramos de unas protestas en San Luis, inclusive que habían cerrado la carretera interestatal 44. Es probable que las protestas sigan durante toda la noche, y han convocado a nuevas protestas para la mañana a partir de las 7 a.m. Esto no ha terminado, de ninguna manera.
El gran jurado: Un chanchullo enfermo, unafarsa obscena
Ciento siete días después de que Michael Brown fue asesinado a tiros en la calle por el “oficial de la policía”
de Ferguson Darren Wilson, el fiscal del Condado de San Luis Robert
McCulloch anunció que a este asesino no lo iban a acusar de ningún
delito, en absoluto.Haciéndose pasar por moralista y "objetivo", McCulloch afirmó que le había dado al gran jurado "todas las pruebas" y que la decisión de dejar que ese PERRO POLICÍA SALIERA IMPUNE representaba la voluntad del pueblo.
¡TONTERÍA!
Toda la treta del gran jurado en este caso
era un chanchullo enfermo y una farsa obscena para ENCUBRIR y TAPAR el asesinato de Michael Brown.La realidad: Los grandes jurados hacen lo que
un fiscal los dirige a que hagan. Una y otra y otra vez, los fiscales
les dicen a los grandes jurados que acusen a los negros y latinos
sobre todo, y una y otra vez esos negros y latinos van camino a la
cárcel, no importa la evidencia. Y eso ocurre antes de que se pueda
decir QUÉ CARAJO.Casi cada vez que un policía mate a un hombre negro, el fiscal decide que dicho asesinato constituye un "homicidio justificable". ¿La diferencia en esta ocasión? Ante gases lacrimógenos, balas de goma y portatropas blindados, las personas de Ferguson se levantaron en protesta heroica y decidida. El mundo presenció una vislumbre de la realidad de la vida, y de la muerte, en Estados Unidos
para millones de personas. Y se parecía a una plantación de esclavos de hoy en día.Por lo que, en lugar de simplemente rendir otra decisión de "homicidio justificable", el fiscal McCulloch les dijo a todos que iba a dejar que un gran jurado decidiera. Pero la decisión de no acusar al asesino policía Darren Wilson fue orquestada desde el principio. Todavía no se conoce toda la historia acerca de la forma que funcionaba el gran jurado, pero había maneras obvias y evidentes de que McCulloch montaba la farsa. Por un lado, casi cada vez que un fiscal presenta un caso a un gran jurado, se realiza con unos cargos recomendados contra el acusado. No es así en este caso. Por lo que se dio un mensaje inconfundible al gran jurado de que este acusado era diferente y se iba a aplicar un conjunto diferente de reglas. McCulloch le daba de comer tonterías al gran jurado. Dejó que el asesino testificara durante horas en defensa de sí mismo (algo que casi nunca ocurre). Y un flujo constante de filtraciones proveniente del gran jurado favoreció al policía asesino Darren Wilson y sembró confusión. McCulloch hizo que toda la "investigación" del gran jurado tardara meses a fin de agotar la energía y la indignación de la gente.
Y ahora este fiscal notoriamente pro-policía, el que en cosa de minutos puede enviar a un hombre negro o latino en el camino a la cárcel, sea inocente o no, quiere hacernos creer como que estuviera por encima de todo. Como si fuera un agente
imparcial de la justicia.No. Él orquestó toda la tapadera del gran jurado.
Darren Wilson Wasn’t the First: A Short History of Killer Cops Let Off the Hook by Flint Taylor
The U.S. has a long history of allowing police to walk free after vicious racist violence.
The pre-ordained failure of a biased local prosecutor to obtain an
indictment against Darren Wilson should not surprise us. But the
movement for justice for Michael Brown has brought widespread attention
to the nationwide problem of systemic and racist police violence and
highlighted the movement that has come together to battle against it.
What follows, then, is a brief history of similar high profile cases where public outrage compelled the justice system to confront acts of racially motivated police violence—with, to say the least, less than satisfactory results.
Chicago
Over the past 45 years, Chicago has been a prime example of official indifference and cover-up when it comes to prosecuting the police for wanton brutality and torture.On December 4, 1969, Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were slain in a police raid that implicated the Cook County State’s Attorney and the FBI’s Cointelpro program. A public outcry led to a Federal Civil Rights investigation. Despite finding that the raiding police fired more than 90 shots to one by the Panthers, the Grand Jury in 1970 did not indict, but rather issued a report that equally blamed the police perpetrators and the Panther victims.
Outrage at this decision led to the appointment of a Special Prosecutor who, in the face of extreme official resistance, obtained an indictment against the police and the State’s Attorneys who planned and executed the raid—not for murder and attempted murder, but rather for obstruction of justice.
The case came to trial in front of a politically connected judge who dismissed the case without even requiring that the charged officials put on a defense. Again, the outrage, particularly in the African-American community was so extreme that the chief prosecutor, Edward V. Hanrahan, was voted out of office a week after the verdict was rendered in 1972.
The Jon Burge police torture scandal provides another stark example. Evidence that had been unearthed over the years demonstrated that a crew of predominately white Chicago police detectives, led by Jon Burge, tortured at least 120 African-American men from 1972 to 1991.
Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley was tendered powerful evidence of this torture as early as 1982, but did not investigate or prosecute Burge and his men. Daley’s office continued to use confessions tortured from the victims to send scores of them to prison—10 of whom went to death row, though they were later saved by a death penalty moratorium in 2000 and by a grant of clemency in 2003 by then-Governor George Ryan—during the next seven years.
In 1989, the local U.S. Attorneys’ office declined to prosecute, as did the Department of Justice in 1996 and Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Devine for the five years directly thereafter. In 2001, due to continuing public pressure, a politically connected Special Prosecutor was appointed to investigate the torture. But after a four year, $7 million investigation, he too refused to indict, instead issuing what is widely considered to be a whitewash report that absolved Daley, Devine, and numerous high Chicago police officials.
Finally, in 2008 the U.S. Attorney indicted Burge for perjury and obstruction of justice, and he was convicted in 2010, and sentenced to 4 ½ years in prison. However, the U.S. Attorney has subsequently declined to prosecute Burge’s confederates for similar offenses.
New Orleans
Chicago is by no means an isolated example of how difficult it is to obtain justice for wanton police violence through the judicial system. In New Orleans, a crew of white detectives responded to the killing of a white police officer in 1980 by terrorizing the black community of Algiers, killing four innocent people and torturing numerous others by “booking and bagging” them: beating suspects with telephone books and suffocating them with bags over their heads.Seven officers were indicted by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations arising from the torture of one of the victims and three were convicted. No officers were charged for the four killings or for the other acts of torture.
In 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, an NOPD officer fatally shot an unarmed black man named Henry Glover, then several of his fellow officers burned his body to cover-up their crime. NOPD officers also shot and killed two unarmed black men on the Danziger Bridge.
After state authorities botched their investigation, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department indicted the officers involved in the two cases and obtained convictions of some of the main police actors. However, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned the verdict in the Glover case, and the trial judge, citing government misconduct, took the extraordinary step of granting the convicted officers a new trial in the Danziger case.
New York
In 1997, an NYPD officer sexually assaulted a Haitian-American man named Abner Louima in a precinct station bathroom by shoving a broken broomstick up his rectum. Louima’s attacker was subsequently charged with federal civil rights violations, while three of his police accomplices were charged with covering up the crimes.After Louima’s attacker pleaded guilty, his accomplices were convicted, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their convictions on the grounds that the lawyers who represented the officers had a conflict of interest.
After they were convicted a second time, the Appeals Court again overturned their convictions—this time on the basis that there was insufficient evidence of intent.
In 1999, four officers from the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who was reaching for his wallet, hitting him 19 times. The officers were indicted for second degree murder and the case was moved to upstate New York, where a jury acquitted the officers.
In July of this year, NYPD officers arrested an African-American man named Eric Garner, allegedly for selling untaxed cigarettes. They put a prohibited chokehold on him, forced him to the ground face first with his hands behind his back, and shoved his face into the pavement, where he died a few minutes later of a heart attack.
The deadly assault, which was captured on videotape, is now under investigation by a Special Grand Jury empaneled by the District Attorney’s Office.
Los Angeles
Among the most notorious cases was the brutal 1991 beating of Rodney King by five LAPD officers. A videotape captured most of the brutality and also showed several other officers standing by and doing nothing to stop the pummeling of a defenseless black man.Four officers were charged at the state level with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force. The trial was moved to a predominantly white suburban county, and three of the officers were acquitted of all charges, while the fourth was acquitted of assault with a deadly weapon and other lesser charges. But the jury failed to reach a verdict on his use of excessive force.
After an angry uprising in the Africa- American community of Los Angeles that left 53 dead and around 2,000 injured, the U.S. Justice Department indicted the four officers, and a federal jury convicted two of them, while acquitting the other two.
This past August, LAPD officers fatally shot an unarmed mentally ill African-American man named Ezell Ford, who witnesses said was shot in the back while lying on the ground. Despite massive protests, there has been no grand jury investigation to date, the autopsy report is yet to be released, and the LAPD has not completed its investigation.
Oakland
In Oakland, California in the late 1990s, a unit of police officers dubbed the “Rough Riders” systematically beat, framed and planted narcotics on African Americans whom they claimed were dealing drugs. Four of the “Riders” were indicted by the District Attorney’s Office, and the trial was moved to a suburban county. The ringleader fled the country, and was tried in absentia.After a year-long trial before a bitterly divided jury on which there were no blacks, the officers were acquitted of eight charges, and the jury was hung on the remaining 27 counts. At the urging of then-Mayor Jerry Brown, the officers were not re-tried.
Also in Oakland, in the early morning hours of New Years Day, 2009, a BART officer shot and killed a young black man named Oscar Grant, who was lying face down, unarmed, in a busy transit station. The shooting was videotaped, and led to militant protests in Oakland.
Another jury with no black members rejected the charge of murder and instead found the officer guilty of involuntary manslaughter. As a result, Oscar Grant’s killer spent less than a year behind bars. The Department of Justice subsequently opened a civil rights investigation, but no charges were brought.
Milwaukee
From 2007-2012 in Milwaukee, a unit of white police officers, spurred on by the Department’s CompStat program of aggressive policing, stopped and illegally body cavity searched more than 70 African-American men whom they claimed to be investigating for drug dealing. In conducting these searches, most commonly performed on the street, the searching officer reached inside the men’s underwear, and probed their anuses and genitals.After this highly illegal practice came to light, the unit’s ringleader, Michael Vagnini, was indicted by the Milwaukee County District Attorney on numerous counts of sexual assault, illegal searches, and official misconduct, while three of the other unit officers were also charged for participating in two of the searches. The unit’s sergeant and several other members of the unit, all of whom were present for many of the searches, were not charged.
The charged officers were permitted to plead guilty to the lesser included offenses of official misconduct and illegal strip searches, with Vagnini receiving a 36-month sentence while the other three received sentences that totaled, collectively, less than a month in jail. By pleading guilty, they also received promises that they would not be charged with federal civil rights violations.
Pattern and Practice Investigations
These high profile cases represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cases where racist police violence has not been subjected to equal justice under the law.Recently, the Justice Department declined to prosecute Little Rock, Arkansas, officers who shot and killed Eugene Ellison, an elderly African American man who was walking out of his home with a cane in his hand, while there have been documented reports of unarmed black men recently being shot down by the police in Chicago; Houston; San Antonio; Beaver Creek, Ohio; and Sarasota, Florida.
In 1994, the United States Congress, recognizing that police misconduct and violence was systemic in many parts of the country, passed 42 U.S. Code Section 14141, which empowered the Justice Department to file suit against police departments alleging patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct, and to obtain wide ranging court orders, consent decrees, and independent monitors in order to implement reforms to those practices.
Although understaffed, the Pattern and Practice Unit of the Justice Department has attacked systemic and discriminatory deficiencies in police hiring, supervision, and monitoring in numerous police departments over the past 20 years.
A particularly egregious act or series of acts of police violence often prompts the Unit to initiate an investigation, and its lawyers have obtained consent decrees or court orders in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Steubenville, Ohio, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Oakland, and Miami.
Last month, lawyers handling the Little Rock cases requested that the DOJ do a pattern and investigation of the LRPD, and the Unit is reportedly now investigating the practices of the Ferguson Police Department. While these investigations are not a panacea, they offer a mechanism for exposing and reforming blatantly unconstitutional police practices, and have also demonstrated how pervasive the problem systemic police violence continues to be.
In light of this history, the pre-ordained failure of a biased local prosecutor to obtain an indictment against Darren Wilson should not surprise us. But the movement for justice for Michael Brown has brought widespread attention to the nationwide problem of systemic and racist police violence and highlighted the movement that has come together to battle against it.
Just two weeks ago, the Brown case, along with the Burge torture cases, was presented to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva. The movement should now turn its attention to the Department of Justice, demanding a federal civil rights indictment against Wilson a full scale pattern and practice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, and, more broadly, an end to systemic and racist police violence.
As the history of the battle against racist police violence so pointedly teaches, the public outcry and agitation must continue not only in Ferguson but across the nation. Because as Frederick Douglas rightly stated many years ago, power concedes nothing without a demand.
Flint Taylor
Flint Taylor is one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and together with his law partner Jeffrey Haas was trial counsel in the marathon 1976 civil trial. For more information on the Hampton/Clark case, the history of Black Panther Party, and the FBI's Program to destroy it, visit peopleslawoffice.com.New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, right, is seen after having fake blood thrown on him during demonstrations in Times Square.
The Blood of the System they will never wash off - Time for Justice for Michael Brown
A reporter from Revolution Newspaper briefly hijacked Missouri Governor Jay Nixon‘s
Ferguson press conference tonight to ask about whether a lack of
indictment would mean “fear for black people all over this country” and
about the Revolutionary Communist Party’s response.
Nixon was taking questions from the press when this reporter, identifying himself as Revolution Newspaper’s Larry Everest, jumped in and shouted, “You need to let the alternative press speak here.”
He asked, “Wouldn’t a lack of indictment mean fear for black people all over this country and objectively a green light for further police violence?”
And he went on to ask Nixon for his response to the Revolutionary Communist Party’s thoughts on Ferguson. Yes, the Revolutionary Communist Party has been in Ferguson and taking a stand against the police. Here’s what one man, identified as a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party, had to say:
“If Darren Wilson walks, America must be brought to a halt. That means no business as usual. It means blocking streets and walking out of schools. It means we refuse to accept this.”
WATCH VIDEO OF LARRY EVEREST HERE :
ALSO LISTEN TO FERGUSON INTERVIEW
Ferguson : Indict their system turn anger into organisation from Nat Wiin , Kasama Editorial Working Group
The system has laid down THEIR verdict. Now, and in the coming days, the people will give OUR verdict.
It has been a long time since the people, in their broad mass, have anticipated and prepared to respond to the oppression and disregard that the United States government has shown Black youth. The police murder of Michael Brown in August of this year in the small midwest town of Ferguson, Missouri, has served as a rallying call to young Black people and all who support their fight against oppression. Both the racist authorities and the people in the streets have been anxiously awaiting this decision on whether to indict Brown's murderer, which is now here.
The national guard has already been called out. The emergency has already been declared. And the people in the streets have been building together to insure that the mockery of justice that is now upon us doesn't go unchallenged.
Predictably, yet another Black life is deemed expendable, and the right of the police to wage a reign of terror over Black communities has again been validated by the grand jury's decision.
Now those of us who stand with the young people of Ferguson must tell the truth: in order to seek justice, to end oppression — the people themselves must unite and rise up. There will be no condescending saviors. We must decide our duty and do it well.
There are times in history when “the people” run ahead of the revolutionary forces in society. While it is clear that many communists, anarchists and other revolutionary-minded people have been strengthening ties with the people in Ferguson and preparing to respond to the grand jury decision that was just laid down; it is also true that the decision may potentially lead to events that we as an emerging revolutionary ecosystem are not yet prepared to influence.
And yes — revolutionaries should seek to engage movements such as the one in Ferguson to help lead them in a revolutionary direction.
What then is it that revolutionaries can provide to the people of Ferguson and their allies?
A crack in a faultline
The rebellion in Ferguson and its aftermath is reflective of a larger problem that the government (at national and local levels) cannot easily resolve or co-opt. Look at how many times the brutality of the police has led to these kind of rebellions within Black communities: Police brutality was the cause of urban rebellions in the 1960s including Watts, to Rodney King in the 1990s, to Cincinnati in 2001, to East Flatbush last year after Kimani Gray was killed, to Ferguson today.
Why is this? Why can't the government and its lackeys like Al Sharpton contain and satisfy the anger of Black people, especially youth? Wouldn't it be easy for the government to just arrest this cop, bring him out in handcuffs and take him to jail? And yet this doesn't happen – and that has been a pattern.
The answer with this has to do with the role of police in relation to Black people.
Black people have been pushed to the margin of societies. The US rulers have not figured a way in which to integrate Black people into the economy since the turn toward de-industrialization.
Increasingly many Black people are unemployed for most of their lives and targeted for prison and ethnic cleansing. They are being isolated, frequently being pushed out of urban cores with the poor enclaves in which they live surrounded and occupied by police forces.
Why are the police given all the military equipment we now see them using in Ferguson? What is all that for?
The fact is that it is the job of these police to terrorize Black people. This is what they are trained to do. They are taught during their training, just as we are taught through mass media, that Black youth will not work, that they are criminal, and that they must be controlled. This is not a question of “some bad cops” or of “hiring cops from the communities they patrol.” The pigs are the pigs. Their role is to terrorize Black people and there is no reforming that basic fact.
This is why the county police in Ferguson think that it was okay to murder Michael Brown. This is why no branch of government will just arrest him. What kind of message would it send to their police, bedrock of this system of repression? If police were prosecuted for brutalizing and executing Black people, then police couldn't do their job, there would be no trust between the police and their political leaders and the system that oppresses Black people wouldn't work.
It must first be realized that the events in Ferguson represent a faultline in the broader society. That is, it is a problem of the capitalist system of oppression that cannot be easily resolved or co-opted by the ruling classes.
Rebellion is right, but it is not revolution
The rebellion in Ferguson has inspired all who care about human liberation.
But street fighting is not the same as revolution and we need to turn the righteous anger of Black youth into disciplined revolutionary organization.
Some sincere people would have the idea that what is needed is to spread the rebellion in Ferguson to other parts of the country. Theirs is the mistaken belief that the key thing that is needed right now is more Fergusons, more riots.
While the spread of rebellions in several urban Black suburban neighborhoods could have a positive effect on the consciousness and fighting spirit of the people, such rebellions alone will not, by themselves, lead to liberation. Obviously we think solidarity actions, including urban rebellions with a real base in their community, are good. But are they enough?
Our responsibilities
Some revolutionary-minded people have put out calls for nationwide action with the hopes of spreading rebellion in the neighborhoods where they are. Is this the key thing that communists should be doing? Do communist networks exist with real ties to the people so that such calls can have the desired effect? If not this call for action, then what?
What Ferguson exposes is the urgent need for communist organization.
We need to do real work to develop networks of people that can respond to events like Ferguson and have real influence over the debates in the broader society when events like Ferguson pop off. Pretending like such networks already occur will not work.
To be clear, there are emerging networks being formed among revolutionaries and this is obviously positive. However this will not replace networks between revolutionaries and the broader people, which are currently primitive. If the people engage in street fighting, then they should be supported and joined, but this cannot be replaced by small revolutionary networks spread out around the country seeking to ignite such rebellions through sheer force of will.
The outrage of the people needs to be transformed into revolutionary organization, not merely courageous yet unorganized fighting. The people in Ferguson are seeing the need for organization and creating it. But there needs to be revolutionary organization. These can include organizations at many levels: Street level organizing projects, mutual aid projects, strong media projects, revolutionary art, music, the capacity for rigorous investigation into 21st century political economy, and more.
All this involves fusing communist ideas with people from diverse backgrounds and experiences. We need to have a sense of direction – direction toward developing the strategy and program that can challenge the existing order of things, and truly begin to liberate Black people and all those who suffer from the inequality, alienation, and misery of capitalism.
Faultlines as spaces where communist organization can take root
Openings to connect communist ideas with a section of the people are not spread evenly throughout society. Those problems in society that are very hard for the ruling classes to resolve have disproportionate potential for communists to develop connections with broader sections of the people. The brutalization and murder of Black people by the police has provoked militant resistance time and time again, It is correct to organize around this fault line.
In Ferguson the people have stared down the barrel of the police gun and have stood their ground. There are those who have argued that there is no potential for revolutionary change in the United States. They say that the majority of society is bought off, more concerned with owning the new iPhone or Nike sneakers than with fighting for liberation.
What would such skeptics have to say about Ferguson, about the willingness of the people to risk arrest and physical harm to demand justice for a young man gunned down by police in their small town? It seems clear that Ferguson in fact reveals something deep about the potential for struggle. But how fundamental the nature of this struggle becomes is now key.
We communists work from the understanding that the people in Ferguson and around the world need liberation. Our responsibilities are not merely to tail behind the spontaneity of the rebellion. We need to be building the types of organization and developing the sophisticated networks that can challenge this society and its rulers that perpetrate police murder of Blacks. What we can offer at our best is a strategy and program for liberation that many people can unite around.
Illusions about the potential for justice in the capitalist USA are worn thin in places like Ferguson. This is a moment when it's important to crystallize what oppressed people are teaching us every day about the way the world works with ways of sustaining the fight and pointing it toward victory.
Source: http://kasamaproject.org/race-liberation/4495-ferguson-indict-the-system-turn-anger-into-organization
MICHAEL BROWN GRAND JURY DECISION : NO MATTER WHAT THE STATE SAYS: OFFICER DARREN WILSON IS GUILTY !
Statement from New Communist Party USA (Liaison Committee)
Yesterday’s news that a St. Louis County grand jury will not indict Ferguson, Mo., white police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of unarmed 18-year-old African American Michael Brown comes as no surprise. In spite of several witnesses, including Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson who was with him at the time of the murder, who saw Brown with his hands up in the air surrendering, in spite of video and audio recording directly after the shooting that conflict with police officer’s reports, in spite of an independent autopsy issued by the Brown family that contradicts original claims that Brown was shot as a result of struggling with officer Wilson, in spite of all of the mounting evidence that contradicts the Ferguson Police Department’s statements and accounts, St. Louis County has decided not to indict officer Wilson.In spite of the vicious character-assassination attempts by the Ferguson Police Department and St. Louis County’s spreading a surveillance video of a man shop-lifting in which they claim was Brown, the masses of Ferguson and their allies were not so easily fooled by these white supremacists tactics. What happened to so many other young men of African descent in this country, including Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and scores of others, was yet again formulaically attempted on Michael Brown.
Instead, St. Louis County, Missouri and the repressive state apparatus of the U.S. have further proven to more and more of the oppressed and exploited masses in the U.S. that we are being brutalized, hunted, stalked, systemically discriminated against and systemically murdered.
The fact that officer Wilson, like countless others before him and surely hundreds of others after, is able to walk away with no indictment after a cold-blooded killing, resonates in the communities of the oppressed nations in the United States.
While struggling with poverty, inadequate employment and schooling; discriminated in virtually all facets of American society, our struggle is further exacerbated by a police force that serves the bourgeoisie and enforces a racial and national oppression that is as clear as day to the naked eye.
It is especially clear when we begin to see Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declare a statewide emergency ahead of the grand jury decision with the Missouri National Guard, Missouri Highway Patrol, St. Louis County Police Department and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department converging on Ferguson under a Unified Command under the cynical guise of “protecting civil rights”.
But the masses grow weary of oppression.
What surely will happen, as what has been happening, is a continued unrest and uprising in Ferguson and all over the U.S. The oppressed are right to rebel. But what is needed now more than ever is the revolutionary understanding of some conclusions:
1) The U.S. is a settler-colonialist capitalist empire with internal colonies/oppressed nations, of which include the Black Nation; this antagonism is violent and deadly and The working class of these oppressed nations along with the working class from the Euro-American must unite to form a United Front to combat not only national oppression and Euro-American chauvinism but capitalism itself, this process includes the creation of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Party of the multi-national working class.
2) The masses cannot rely on the police (or any other state representation) for genuine protection and service; it is not in the interest of the capitalist-serving police to protect and serve our communities.
3) Oppressed nationalities, but principally people of African descent, have always been targeted and brutalized; Michael Brown is not a unique phenomenon in the settler-colonialist-capitalist-imperialist history of the U.S.
4) The masses need their own proletarian protection, our own bases, our own forces, our own counter-hegemonic movement: our own dual power. The masses need a People’s Army, and this Army can only be lead by the Communist Party, and as such we must construct the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party. Struggles in different localities should form self-defense groups to form an attempt at resistance such as the formation of cop watches to act as a counterweight against police brutality, with the recognition that these forms are also limited as well in terms of their impact and scope but that are necessary in providing some form of material relief to the masses who suffer from brutal forms of violence and extra-judicial killings.
We stand in solidarity with the masses in Ferguson, Mo., and all over the U.S. that organize against police terror. We stand in full support of the rebelling oppressed masses who cry out for fundamental change. We stand in unequivocal support for all those who see these injustices as further proof, as further evidence, as an indictment against the white supremacist capitalist-imperialist nature of the U.S.
Long live the rebelling masses of Ferguson!
Long live the oppressed people of the U.S!
Down with Capitalism and Imperialism!
Arms Up!
Resist The State!
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