New York City, December 13 — Among the many hundreds of protests worldwide against racist police murder, I joined marches with my co-workers and PLP throughout the city, from Harlem to Foley Square. What does this amazing upsurge of antiracist, anti-police, and at least partly anti-capitalist feeling mean for revolutionary communists today? How can the Party seize this political-economic moment to mobilize more of our class for revolution?
We must be clear about our view of the police and the state. We begin from the vicious global competition among the rival big capitalists, heading towards a worldwide conflict among imperialists.  To prepare for that conflict and to emerge from the economic crisis, they are all cracking down on workers with harsh racist austerity, increasing the rate of exploitation and therefore arousing the anger of workers everywhere who are jobless or underpaid, with terrible schools, housing and healthcare. How does racist capitalism deal with the danger of working-class anger exploding, especially among the most exploited Black, brown, and immigrant workers?  Through the state. Through the police!
The State
Lenin in State and Revolution showed that the state is not a neutral force above society, but that every form of the state in history has expressed the domination over society of one social class. The state is a system of class rule. The ruling class relies on the unions, schools, media, churches, courts and politicians to control the workers on a daily basis. When these institutions fail to confine us in the prison of ideology, the rulers turn to repression: first the police, then the National Guard, and finally the full might of the armed forces are sent out to beat the workers into submission. At its brutal core, the state is simply composed of “special bodies of armed men” (Lenin) who guarantee class rule. As exploitation increases to win the capitalists’ competition against global rivals, the repressive force of the state will increasingly come to the fore, starting with its first line of defense, the police.
The Police
The first modern police force in what is now the United States, beginning in South Carolina in 1704, was the slave patrol. These forces hunted down and punished runaway and “defiant” slaves; they were a form of organized terror to deter revolts that might threaten plantation profits.
According to historian Diane McWhorter, the Ku Klux Klan formed alliances with governors’ administrations in states like Alabama and Mississippi. Throughout the South and Midwest, Klan members and local cops (often the same people) conspired to attack and murder civil rights activists.
The police target workers dangerous to capital, those who pose the most danger to the profit system when mobilized in groups: striking, organizing in the workplace, agitating in the neighborhoods and campuses, massing in the city centers.  
In a racist system the most dangerous workers are the super-exploited, communists, and militant workers. The crime-fighting aspect of police work is also targeted at dangerous workers, those who turn to antisocial crime, which endangers the established capitalists’ interests as well as disrupting workers’ lives. Crime is also a pretext for violent police patrols.
A key part of the police defense of capital is attack: they pre-empt worker upsurges by attacking first, terrorizing and intimidating the angry ones who might organize to fight back, especially Black, Latin, and immigrant workers. Armed police attack is backed up by the media, educators, clergy, courts and politicians who either defend police violence or counsel workers not to fight back. Violent, aggressive police patrols in Black and Latin areas (stop-and-frisk, broken windows), and police repression even of modest peaceful protest with shows of police power, embody this attack-first, pre-emptive strategy to instil fear in us. They would like us to back down without a fight so they “pre-frighten” us.
The Rule of Law
Laws, courts and prisons are annexes to state armed force, not the other way around; armed force is the foundation of the state, and the grand structure of laws and courts simply the hypocrite’s mask covering the state monopoly of violence. Their vaunted “rule of law” (used to justify the grand jury system and the whole authority of the police) is nothing but the rule of capitalists through their “special bodies of armed men,” masked and enabled by the laws capitalists themselves make through their bought-and-sold politicians, and administered by the courts the capitalists control through their political vetting of judges.
 The police and capitalists themselves break their own laws with impunity, backed by obedient courts. Drug laws enable racist mass incarceration (preventive detention for workers who might prove dangerous to capital). The body of law and bourgeois legal thought are also part of the ideological function of the state: war and torture in U.S. foreign policy are legitimate if a law can be written to cover them.
Racism: Essential to Capitalist Profit, Police, and State Power
Where the working class is multiracial as it is in the U.S., systemic racism marks both ideological and repressive state functions; many people are now up in arms against this racist character of the police and prison systems. U.S. capitalists’ state power is founded on racism because it is essential to their continued rule as well as to maximizing profit. Huge profit: hundreds of billions a year from the differences between the wages and services of Black and brown workers compared to white; between women and men workers; between native-born and immigrant workers. Capitalism will not give up this blood money and will use the full force of the state to hold on to it.
State racism functions to crush the revolt of the most exploited of our class, who are Black and Latin; it is meant to stop white workers from following the lead of Black and Latin rebels; and it hopes to split the fight-back of the working class along racial lines. The robber baron Jay Gould put it this way: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”  They wish!  But our mass marches are showing how we can come together against racism.
Police violence and mass imprisonment against Black and Latin workers, especially young men and women, is the cutting edge of this racist use of state power. The violence of the racist state at home carries over into the U.S. imperialists’ racist armies abroad as they gruesomely kill and torture workers who are most often Black and brown. These facts define a capitalism with its bloody roots in slavery. But all workers of whatever “race” must fight racism against any part of our class. Racism assaults and insults us all. We need the might of the whole class — led by the most oppressed workers — to smash racism, that bosses’ tool, forever.
Dialogue between Communist and Other Ideas in the Movement
The antiracist marchers of course have interesting and moving ideas of their own about racism, the police, and, more rarely but increasingly, capitalism and its state power. One noticeable thing in New York is the students and young professionals of all origins carrying eloquent statements by antiracist rebel writers like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. There is a ferment of ideas as well as of action in this upsurge, and a constant, wonderful self-assessment of aims and methods. In that spirit, we offer readers these introductory notes on the police and the state under capitalism. We want to engage you in dialogue about this, as our comrades are doing in Ferguson, Brooklyn, the Bay Area, and other sites of racist police killings.
Of course the police and state functions of capitalist society are more complex than this article can do justice to, and there are many apparent exceptions to these claims. We would only say here that the exceptions, when analyzed, prove the rule. De Blasio is already backing a police hunt for six protesters who dared to resist police attempts to arrest a marcher. He is also against penalties for the use of the chokehold, the technique used to kill black worker Eric Garner. There is liberal and there is fascist policing, but scratch a liberal and you will always find a fascist, when hypocritical ideology needs to give way to iron repression.
The Only Solution Is Communist Revolution
Ultimately justice for workers must mean smashing the capitalist state and abolishing the racist ruling class with armed revolution. The state will be in the hands of the  working class and the working class alone. We ask all antiracists to think about that challenging truth. Justice means ending all exploitation, not reforming a system whose whole purpose is to continue exploitation.
We invite you to study with us all these questions affecting our progress and success.  
We invite you to organize with PLP, a revolutionary communist party, to advance antiracism.  
We invite you to consider joining the struggle against racism and capitalism, to fight for an egalitarian world without racist exploitation, and, to that end, to join PLP and help build an effective, multiracial, international, revolutionary communist party.
Our Party, like you, is full of hope, because we have the strength of a long communist tradition behind us as well as the energy in the present of all those who revolt today, who say racism must be fought today. A different future is waiting to be built. Join us!

Berkeley, Missouri, December 23 — These racist cops kill with impunity! A kkkop murdered 18-year-old Black teen Antonio Martin on the night of December 23. The incident took place here just a few miles from Ferguson, the site of the racist murder of Michael Brown. Over 300 people rallied, setting off fireworks and throwing bricks and rocks at the police.
Bosses are now spreading their racist slander against this Black teen murdered by cops, but they paint their kkkops as heroes. In New York City, the mayor banned protests in “respect to mourn” the two cops killed.
These racist bosses have nothing to offer our class, not even sympathy. That’s because the bankers and politicians make money off the terrorization and genocide of the working class. Capitalism is the real criminal. Cops and bosses can get away with murder while the working class gets terrorized, deported, disappeared, starved, and killed — all legal under capitalism.  
This is war against our class. The bosses preach peace and shoot bullets. The state of Missouri has spent over $12.5 million since Ferguson to quell protests.
Workers and youth in Missouri will continue to rebel and will have the backing of the international working class. Justice for Mike Brown, Vonderrit Myers, and Antonio Martin will come from the working-class burying this murderous system once and for all. This means a violent communist revolution.
We are organizing on our jobs and in our schools, churches, unions, military and many other places where workers are present. We are building a mass movement to combat police terror, imperialist wars and their root cause: capitalism. Spark walkouts, strikes, rebellions and turn them into armed struggle for communist revolution. In the process, we are winning workers and youth to see that racist terror will end only when the working class takes power with communist revolution. Our strategy is to build a Party of millions leading millions more, across all borders.

Are cops across the U.S. trained to shoot innocent Black men but not whites who go on a shooting spree? Read the following excerpt from the January 5th New York Times and see if cops’ racist profiling kills Black males for no reason while refusing to arrest a white woman, wearing body armor, who flaunted a gun, shot at people multiple times and at a cop and led police in a chase through the streets.

There’s absolutely no doubt that racism is a killer, which the bosses use to win white workers to capitalist goals.
The day after Christmas, a shooter terrorized the streets of…Chattanooga, Tenn. According to the local newspaper, the shooter was “wearing body armor” and “firing multiple shots out her window at people and cars.” One witness told the paper that the shooter was “holding a gun out of the window as if it were a cigarette.”
“Officers found two people who said they were at a stop sign when a woman pulled up…and fired shots into their vehicle, hitting and disabling the radiator….More calls reported a woman pointing a firearm at people as she passed them in her car and…fired at another vehicle in the same area.”
When police officers came upon the shooter…[she] led them on a chase,….even point[ing] the gun at a police officer….
…Surely…officers would have been justified in using whatever force they saw fit. Right?
According to the paper, the shooter was “taken into custody without incident or injury.”
Who was this shooter anyway? Julia Shields, a 45-year-old white woman….
Would this episode have ended this way if the shooter had been…black….?
…The American mind has been poisoned from this country’s birth against…particularly African-American men….
It’s hard to read stories like this and not believe that there is a double standard in the use of force by the police…..
Michael Brown was unarmed….in Ferguson, Mo….
Eric Garner was unarmed on a Staten Island [N.Y.] street.
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old, walking around a Cleveland park and holding a toy gun….
John Crawford was in an Ohio Walmart, holding, but not shooting, an air rifle he had picked up from a store shelf….
And last Tuesday, the police say, a hand gun was “revealed” during a New Jersey traffic stop of a car Jerome Reid was in.
None were “arrested without incident or injury.” They were all Black, killed by police officers. Brown was shot through the head. Garner was grabbed around the neck in a chokehold, tossed to the ground and held there, even as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe….Rice was shot within two seconds of the police officers’ arrival on the scene. Crawford…and Reid were also cut down by police bullets.
In the cases…heard so far,…grand juries have refused to indict the officers.
It seems walking, selling, playing, shopping or driving while Black is a death sentence. Racism produces super-profits for the bosses. The only answer is a death sentence for capitalism.

Much of the class struggle engaged in by workers and much of the deadly injustices U.S. bosses inflict on them is missing from high school and college textbooks. In a communist society, all workers would be taught the real history of this capitalist system.
Recently I was walking through the St. Bridget Cemetery in Lilly, Pa, located in the heart of Western Pennsylvania’s coalfields when I stumbled upon a large monument marking the burial site of 35 immigrant railroad workers from Italy and countless others whose names, according to the stone, “are known only by god.” These workers died in a massacre in 1903.
I researched it and found that the railroad bosses had constructed wooden buildings for the workers to sleep in. In some cases, nearly 150 workers were jammed into buildings containing only one door and a few small windows. Needless to say, they were fire traps.
One night a building burst into flames. The workers struggled desperately to escape, but many became entangled at the solitary exit and died. Their remains were placed in 12 coffins and buried in one large grave. This is just one example in U.S. history of bosses’ crimes committed against workers.
The Lilly miners have a militant and anti-racist history. In the early 1920s, the Klan rode into Lilly and marched to a nearby hillside where they burned a KKK cross to protest the exclusion of Klansmen from the miners’ union. On their return to the railway station, local workers sprayed them with water hoses. Shots rang out and two people lay dead.
In 1970, union miners burned a coal tipple (vehicle) to the ground at a non-union mine near Lilly. The union was later fined, but this did not dampen their militancy.
These are examples of the sort of injustices suffered by workers here and their fightback against them over the years. It’s important for workers to learn all this as we continue to struggle against this decadent death-dealing capitalist system. I look forward to the day when all of this is included in history books.