On March 16, 2000, Patrick Dorismond and a friend were hailing a cab in Manhattan when undercover Detective Anthony Vasquez — not identifying himself as a cop — asked Dorismond if he had any drugs to sell. Indignant, Patrick told him “No!” in no uncertain terms. Patrick was angered by the insistent “dealer.” When Patrick tried to wave him off, the cop punched him. Patrick defended himself and immediately was shot by another cop and lay on the street in pool of blood, gasping for air. He died soon after.
The next weekend a large, militant demonstration occurred at Patrick’s workplace, attended by many rank-and-file community groups. The protesters tore down barricades and the police were told not to “escort” the marchers. While politicians and misleaders called for a federal investigation, the protesters’ mood was clearly different. People were very receptive to Progressive Labor Party literature and CHALLENGE. Some speakers championed the need to close down Wall Street and the city’s business districts.
The Masses Are Heroes
Then on March 25, some PLP members marched with the funeral procession that eventually numbered over 7,000 people. As this sea of angry workers saw Patrick Derision’s casket being passed into the church, a roar of rage filled the air. One thousand cops barricaded the area, trying to contain these workers. Our bullhorn created an open mike that became the voice of many protesters.
The masses surged forward and tore the barricades down. The cops retreated. The crowd was emboldened. Drums pounded, workers screamed with anger. Our PLP banner “Destroy Police Terror with Communist Revolution” remained at the front and people continued to speak for nearly two hours outside the funeral service.
When it ended, again the workers surged forward, amid chants to march to the 67th precinct. The cops had no intention of allowing such a mass of angry workers near their station.
When one group broke through a barricade, a genuine street battle ensued. Bottles and batteries rained down on the cops who swung wildly into the crowd with clubs and pepper spray. But the youth didn’t back down and led the way, hurling everything they could find at the cops, then retreating quickly for half a block. The cops found only empty streets. Then the youth would launch another round and the events would be repeated.
Cops on horseback galloped down the street, further enraging the workers. They leapt into the streets, flipping barricades and crisscrossing them so that an entire block became an obstacle course for the horses. Buying time this way, the workers raced to the next intersection and blended once again into the crowd.
That night Flatbush remained under heavy police presence. Meanwhile, any empty squad car had its windows smashed and tires slashed.
Our Party, having organized in Flatbush for many years, particularly among high school students and young workers, created lots of opportunities at the rally. Many participated with us throughout the day.
Now we must bring the issue of police terror to our jobs and schools. With consistent activity in mass organizations and solidifying deep ties with as many workers and youth as possible, a modest group can have a mass effect.
In July, the names of Manuel Diaz and Joel Acevedo were added to those of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, Rasheed Simms, Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, Sergio Guereca, Carlos La Madrid, Derek Lopez, Raul Rosas and countless others who have been murdered by the police. In the immediate aftermath of the Manuel Diaz murder, residents of the Anaheim, CA, neighborhood where he was shot took to the streets to confront the police over the unjustified killing. Police dispersed the crowd with tear gas, rubber bullets and a rampaging police dog that tried to attack an infant (Democracy Now, 7/24/12).
The murders and the police response have led many to wonder whether the police have declared war on black and Latino communities. In fact, for forty years now the police have officially declared war on the entire working class. Following the urban uprisings of the late 1960s, the ruling class looked for better ways to control working-class anger. Because black, Latino and immigrant workers are the most exploited under capitalism, the bosses fear their anger and use racist ideas and outright racist attacks to keep populations passive. Since the sixties, the police have become increasingly militarized.
Marines Train SWAT Teams
The police began to train with Special Forces units back from Vietnam in techniques to put down insurgent movements. The LAPD, ever the “innovators,” responded to labor unrest by creating the first SWAT teams, trained at Camp Pendleton Marine base in military techniques of civilian repression. Indeed, their first deployment was in operations attacking striking farm workers in Delano, CA, in 1969.
Since then, a mix of increased federal funding and confiscation laws passed in the 1980s has led to the proliferation of paramilitary SWAT teams across the country, armed to the teeth with the latest military weaponry. Few understand the extent to which these units were armed directly by the military. Between 1995 and 1997 the Defense Department gave out, free of cost, 6,400 bayonets, 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 M-79 grenade launchers, and 112 Armored Personnel Carriers. The number of these paramilitary units has increased to over 1,200 today in diverse communities from New York City to the University of Central Florida.
This new strategy of counter-insurgency that developed in U.S. policing after the 1960s was called “weed and seed” amongst police forces but is known better by its military jargon “Clear-Hold-Build.” The idea was to single out “trouble spots” (working-class neighborhoods) and flood them with SWAT-team raids in an overwhelming show of force: “shock and awe,” which includes the stop-and-frisk of hundreds of thousands of mainly black and Latino youth.
Community Policing: The ‘Friendly’ Cops
Then while police terror was still high a program of community infiltration would begin. Known as “community policing,” officers walk neighborhood streets and infiltrate schools, churches and youth programs under the guise of police-community partnerships. Schools install metal detectors and allow police to roam their halls, making the student body conform to the fascist invasion of personal space. Churches bring police into community partnerships that provide a cover for police abuse. Various youth programs encourage kids to see the police as their allies in a struggle against their own community.
Under community policing, the police are able to gather intelligence on target communities that is stored in digital information warehouses. In LA, police carry a list of 65 “suspicious activities” that, when witnessed, are filed in a report that is catalogued at a Joint Fusion Center (a digital database that can be accessed by police, FBI, and Dept. of Homeland Security). It is important to note that in these intelligence operations no crime is being committed, yet surveillance is legalized. As participants in the “war on terror,” police and intelligence agencies openly spy on citizens in ways that would have been kept secret a generation ago.
Police use this intelligence gathering to then disrupt activities of those who might pose a threat to the capitalist order. Their strategy is classic counter-insurgency. Shock the system with a massive show of force, then infiltrate the community dissolving the social bonds that tie people together. Once the population is isolated by terrorism and induced paranoia, they can be dominated. They become more susceptible to the attacks on their wages, schools, health, and environment that allow the capitalists to live large on the backs of the working class.
New Strategy A Killing Machine
The result of the adoption of a counter-insurgency strategy by police has been a steady increase in the number of police murders, which average 373 people killed per year (though the lack of statistics makes this a low estimate). The use of deadly force by police increased 34% during the 1990s. During the year 2001 there were over 40,000 deployments of SWAT teams against communities, and since 2001 there has been a 25% rise in the number of police brutality cases filed (which again grossly underestimates the actual numbers). Since 9/11 and the creation of the Homeland Security department, police and military forces have only increased their collaboration. The police have been so successful in their war that Marines received training from the LA SWAT team in urban warfare before deploying to Afghanistan in 2010.
The police violence that has claimed the lives of so many people in the U.S. is endemic to the system of capitalism that sees workers as a commodity to be dominated and exploited. The violence on the streets of New York and LA is also visited on the people in Kabul, Baghdad, and elsewhere. Imperialism breeds fascism at home and in turn fascism at home spawns violence in the imperial periphery. When capitalism is in crisis, as it is today, the capitalists’ only solution is to squeeze the working class. This means that police violence is hardly the work of “a few bad apples.” Rather it is the natural response of a repressive system that demands total obedience from the working class.J
(For more information on police tactics see the work of Christian Parenti and Kristian Williams.)
A group of workers associated with several community organizations conducted militant protests in front of two car washes, property of two different owners. The group chanted “Car Washers United Will Never Be Defeated” and “Workers United Will Never Be Defeated,” as well as many other militant slogans. We showed our solidarity with these mostly immigrant workers, some undocumented, who’ve had “enough” and have decided to form a trade union to fight for their rights and to be heard. These workers are fighting for a higher minimum wage and better working conditions.
Justice and Workers’ Rights
Just the mention of these two ideas got the owners of the car washes to retaliate against the workers, reducing their working hours and harassing them to force them to quit their jobs. The main issue here is the soon-approaching union elections.
One of the owners is called Gary, but workers call him “Claws” (which in Spanish rhymes with Gary). In spite of all his efforts, this abusive exploiter couldn’t break our consciousness and unity. His attacks only motivated us to chant louder in the last protests, which we hope are only the beginning.
At the Long Beach Car Wash, one of the workers, who at the time was drying a car, took the lead and raising a fist begun chanting our slogans in front of “Claws.” His arrogant expression and attitude when he didn’t meet the workers’ demands on time, showed his hatred towards those whose prompt, daily work, makes him richer.
This shows once again, that workers’ struggle against the bosses, whose only purpose is to increase their profits through thievery, exploitation and abuses of the working class, must grow. We have to win these workers to deepen the struggle, because the fight for simple demands under capitalism cannot solve our problems. Only communism can put an end to this scourge. This is why we must win the working class to fight for a revolution.
- Information
Apartheid Alive in South Africa Armed Miners Defy Racist Massacre
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- 05 September 2012 73 hits
Apartheid is alive and growing in South Africa. The racist police massacre of 34 striking miners, the wounding of 78 others and the arrest of 259 outside the Lonmin platinum mine in Rustenberg on August 16 mirrors the apartheid of the late 20th century, the one of a racist white Nazi-type capitalist ruling class oppressing the entire black population. In fact, apartheid became a virtual synonym for racism.
“The strike and the government’s iron-fisted response are emblematic of…South Africa’s largely white-owned business establishment and…[the fact] that the ANC [African National Congress] and its allies have become too cozy with big business” (New York Times, 8/17).
The current apartheid pits this mostly white big business class joined with a small black government elite of profiteers enforcing the same capitalist oppression against the entire, mostly black working class. And similar to the previous rebellions of the last century, workers are mounting armed resistance.
Eight miners were killed on August 10, when 3,000 miners, mostly rock drillers, went out on a wildcat strike demanding a tripling of their poverty-level wages which have remained as low as they were under apartheid, 18 years ago. “If we stop, it all stops,” they proclaimed. “If neither the union nor the employer will listen, we will make them. We will apply objective violence until they are forced to listen to our grievances.”
The mine cannot operate without the rock drillers who work at dangerous depths, holding 50-pound drills against the rock face, their bodies vibrating for the duration of their 8-hour shifts. Then they emerge to the misery of shack dwellings, with no electricity, running water or sanitation.
The rock-drillers are not allowed to live in the real cities of South Africa, sentenced like nonpersons to a life of wage slavery deep below ground in a “planet of slums,” but their strike shook the market in the great financial centers of the capitalist world. They are an inspiration to workers everywhere!
Lonmin — the world’s third largest platinum mining company in a country that produces 80 percent of the world’s platinum reserves — labeled the strike “illegal.” A largely black police force (BBC News, 8/17) was ordered out to escort in any potential scabs. On August 16, they set up a barricade of razor wire encircling the miners. The police demanded they disarm and disperse. The miners, armed with machetes, sticks, spears and clubs, fought back, outflanked the cops and tried to burst through the cordon to bar scabs from breaking the strike.
Then the police, holding automatic rifles, pistols and shotguns, began spraying the miners with tear gas. As the miners tried to escape the gas, the cops opened fire hitting many miners in the back. “After three minutes of gunfire, bodies littered the ground in pools of blood” (The Guardian, 8/17). A 36-year-old miner named Paulos said, “They started shooting at us with rubber bullets. Then I saw people were falling and dying for real. I knew then they were proper bullets” (New York Times, 8/18). The scene echoed the previous apartheid era when the cops and the military used live ammunition to quell protests.
The miners, who now earn $300 to $500 a month, are demanding monthly raises of $625 to $1,563. An August 14 report by the Bench Marks Foundation, which monitors multi-national mining corporations, said Lonmin has a “bad track record, with high levels of fatalities” and keeps workers in “very poor living conditions. Children suffer from chronic illnesses due to sewage spills caused by broken drainage” (Associated Press, 8/17).
Workers Condemn Bosses, Governing ANC and Union Partners
Miner Thuso Masakeng told the Agency France Press (8/17), “We can’t afford a decent life. We live like animals because of poor salaries….We are being exploited; both the government and the unions have failed to come to our rescue. Companies make a lot of money at our expense and we get paid almost nothing.”
Joyce Lebelo, a miner’s wife, built a tiny shack in 1998, thinking the new government would soon provide her with a proper house. She is still waiting. “When we voted, we didn’t think we would spend ten years living in a shack. The promises they made they have not delivered. The people who got power are fat and rich. They have forgotten the people at the bottom.”
As one official of a new, militant miners’ union said, “We made the ANC what it is today, but they have no time for us. Nothing has changed. Only the people on top and they keep getting more money” (NYT, 8/17).
PLP Analysis Proved
Correct
This situation was exactly what the Progressive Labor Party warned would ensue when Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress took the reins of government eighteen years ago. Although Mandela spent decades in jail, he was not about to lead a revolution against capitalism that created these abominable conditions. One of his early pronouncements was to reject worker demands for increased wages and benefits on the grounds that it would “discourage foreign [capitalist] investment.”
When PLP declared that the maintenance of capitalism would continue the apartheid-era exploitation of black workers, we were roundly criticized by all the liberals, nationalists and pseudo-leftists who predicted a “new era of freedom.” What the working class got was rampant unemployment, deep poverty, intolerable working conditions, squalid housing and an emerging, tiny elite class of black oppressors who — along with the dominant apartheid-era corporate rulers — profited from the misery of the masses. And then and now, U.S. corporations like GM and Ford netted tens of millions in super-profits from that racist exploitation.
As we said then and reiterate now, only a communist revolution, and the building of a party to lead it, can solve the problems these miners, and all workers, face. Only a system without bosses and profits can enable the working class, which produces everything of value, to reap all the fruits of our labor, according to need.
Union Colludes with Bosses
The capitalist media has been painting the miners’ struggle as one stemming from competition between rival unions rather than growing out of real demands over real oppressive conditions. The rank-and-file rock-drillers are self-organized, under their own leadership and have armed themselves to fight for the integrity of their strike against all comers, joined by women from the shantytown armed with knobkerries (clubs).
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is closely allied with the governing ANC, and has lost the majority of its miner members. The NUM’s former leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, is now a rich director on the Lonmin board. The NUM has been challenged by the new, militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The latter has been demanding “sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and working conditions for miners” while exposing the NUM’s alliance with the government.
NUM general secretary Frans Baleni defended the police action, saying, “The police were patient.” (NYT, 8/17) When the NUM president addressed the strikers and echoed the bosses’ line, calling on them to return to work, the miners began yelling their opposition, forcing the cops to escort him safely away. The traitorous South African “Communist” Party called for the arrest of the AMCU leaders. However, the latter head a reform union with no political vision beyond immediate demands. While verbally defending the workers against the avalanche of media condemnation, they did not organize the strike or join the workers in battle.
A striking winch operator and AMCU member who gave his name as Kelebone and makes $500 a month for difficult, dangerous work said, “NUM has deserted us. NUM is working with the [rulers] and getting money. They forgot about the workers.” (Boston Globe, 8/17)
The British-owned company, declaring the strike “illegal,” has obtained a court order to force the workers back to work or be fired. But winch operator Makosi Mbongane, 32, told the Associated Press, “They can beat us, kill us and kick and trample on us,…do whatever they want to do, we aren’t going back to work.”
As AMCU strike leader Joseph Mathunjwa told Reuters, “We’re going nowhere. If need be, we’re prepared to die here.”
This is an anti-imperialist struggle against a huge mining company, tightly knit with the rich post-apartheid local elite, who sit on the board and protect their super-profits. It is also an antiracist struggle. Only communism can end racism everywhere.
This is a huge potential base for an international revolutionary communist movement and party, the missing ingredient needed to turn these brave miners toward revolution based on international class unity. This can bypass the mistakes of the old communist movement and dare to win it all.
“I never thought I’d see this in my South Africa in a million years.” That’s how one young reporter, speaking for many, expressed his horror at the racist police massacre of 34 striking miners, the wounding of 78 others and the arrest of 259 outside the Lonmin platinum mine on August 16.
This horror is compounded by the fact that one of the most inspiring and heroic struggles of the later 20th Century was the mass struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. Workers and students organized a movement of millions under the most Nazi-like terror, led by the African National Congress (ANC). Miners, auto and transit workers and students led strikes and walkouts while their leaders were either in prison or in exile. They carried out armed struggle.
But rather than fight for communism, the ANC came to power almost 20 years ago after reaching an accommodation with the racist bosses and bankers and disarming the workers and youth. This horrible betrayal was celebrated with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after more than 25 years.
On August 10, 3,000 miners, mostly rock drillers, went on a wildcat strike demanding a tripling of their poverty wages (they earn $300 to $500 a month). Lonmin, the world’s third largest platinum mining company has a “bad track record, with high levels of fatalities” and keeps workers in “very poor living conditions. Children suffer from chronic illnesses due to sewage spills caused by broken drainage.” (Associated Press, 8/17)
Last week, The ANC government sent black and white police to set up a barricade of razor wire encircling the miners. The miners, armed with machetes, spears and clubs, outflanked the cops and tried to stop scabs from breaking the strike. The police gunned them down.
This fight is as much against the ANC as it is the mine operators. As one official of a new, radical miners’ union said, “We made the ANC what it is today, but they have no time for us. Nothing has changed.” (NYT, 8/17)
Back when the ANC made peace with Apartheid, workers and youth were waving red flags and demanding more guns. The most militant youth movement called themselves the “Comrades.” The Lonmin massacre is a grim reminder that there can be no peace with the racist profit system. The bosses and cops must be destroyed. A communist society that meets the needs of the international working class must be built on their graves. The heroic Lonmin miners are giving us a lesson in blood. We in Progressive Labor Party support them. We oppose their foes. We fight for communist revolution, from South Africa to the U.S.
