“The mayor’s hands are literally dripping with our blood because of his words actions and policies and we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ police department. We will act accordingly.”
These were the infamous words written in a statement by the Police Benevolent Association of New York, the “union” of the N.Y. Police Department in reaction to the killing of two cops on Dec. 20. Such an unusually public division between the elected façade of the capitalist state and its armed repressive apparatus gives us a rare glimpse into the potential for a heightened period of overt, violent class conflict.
That the police have felt so threatened by the increasing effectiveness of the anti-police brutality movement’s message and have reacted in such a disproportionately aggressive manner towards a liberal politician who showed even some sympathy towards that message is informative of the struggles to come. The anti-police brutality movement has yet to develop even a weak anti-establishment voice in the bourgeois state apparatus; it has no politicians or judges pushing for the prosecution of racist killer cops or writing laws to remove the power of union protections or punish the withholding of critical police incident reports. Yet, even this current grassroots push-back against the the largest police force in the U.S., a force that the former millionaire mayor Bloomberg referred to as “my own army … which is the seventh biggest army in the world,” drew from them the declaration of war on the people.
Cop coups are rare in the modern era of capitalism, especially in imperialist countries. Given that the police are first and foremost the protectors of property, the capitalists and the politicians who work for them understand the need to guarantee their absolute protection under their laws. However, in developing capitalist countries that seek to defend themselves against imperialist domination, the divisions among the bourgeoisie coupled with vibrant and militant social movements disrupt the unity of the state, in some cases resulting in the rebelling of cops. Such was the case in Ecuador on Sept. 30, 2010.
Unlike the U.S., Ecuador has experienced numerous rebellions by revolutionary and progressive movements in the past two decades. In reaction to neo-liberal policies of the early 1990s, which plunged the country’s economy into several crises, the movements forced the destabilization, overthrow and/or resignation of seven presidents in less than 10 years until Rafael Correa, a radical nationalist, was elected in 2007. Correa, in the tradition of the Latin America’s anti-imperialist left exemplified by Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, got rid of U.S. military bases and Drug War policies. Ecuador, under Correa, has sought to develop its national industry, eliminate extreme poverty and raise the standard of living for its population.
Such an approach to intervening in the capitalist state is not agreed upon by all capitalists. Often the competing forces, especially those tied to transnational corporations or U.S. interests, take advantage of political crises to undermine social change. Such was the case of the attempted police coup in 2010. The Correa administration had announced a new Public Service Law, which would restructure some of the salaries and benefits of all public workers. The police, who felt threatened by the new law, protested. Correa went to the National Police Headquarters in an attempt to have a dialogue but was welcomed instead with tear gas canisters and threats against his life. As documented in a stunning video, Correa dared the cops to kill him and vowed that the people would respond accordingly.
The police held the president captive at the National Police Hospital until a special unit of the military fought through police lines and rescued him. Mass protest had already taken to the streets in support of Correa. As investigations later showed, the police uprising had been supported by the Ecuadorian right-wing with close consultation of USAID organizations. The cop rebellion, which claimed to be fighting for better salaries and working conditions, was actually the embryo of reactionary counter-revolution seeking to overturn the progressive developments in Ecuador.
So what is to become of the reactionary embryo represented by the cop protests, protests that can easily be organized into a coup? The U.S. does not have a mass social movement grounded in years of class and revolutionary struggle. Those in control of the settler capitalist slave state of white-supremacy are not remotely progressive, let alone revolutionary. The only elements to the right of the current power structure are the Tea party conservatives with fascistic tendencies whose ideologies already permeate the police and the military.
A comrade who participated in the social justice movements in Latin America once said: “You know, people in the U.S. think this country’s politics are so pure because no one (at the head of political parties, state agencies or heads of capitalist industry) ever goes to jail. They think there is no corruption. Then they claim Latin America is so much more corrupt, but that is because the state is often influenced by divided interest, whether capitalist or social movement in character. So they fight among each other all the time.”
Police act with impunity
Comparing the attempted Ecuadoran cop coup with the war declaration by the NYPD affirms this statement. There is massive corruption in all police departments around the country. From drug trafficking to money laundering to Klan occupations of neighborhoods to outright racist murders, the police act with impunity. In fact not only are they protected, they are rewarded for their role in defending the rights of the equally corrupt 1 percent. Here in the U.S., this unity of the violently corrupt has historical roots in male-dominated white supremacy.
Abroad, U.S. imperialism has sold the idea of dominance and superiority to even the second-class bourgeoisie that carry the face of the oppressed. So in twisted irony, the age of Obama has not forced the cracking of the racist colonial U.S. State, but rather has in fact solidified and strengthened its most repressive elements.
These elements of the state are held in the highest regard, financially and socially, by all those in power no matter what level of the state, local or national. In San Francisco, for example, no police officer takes home less than $100,000 while teachers, whose salaries are too low for them to afford to live in the city, make an average of around $65,000. No capitalist politician or non-profit ever questions the fact that police salaries allow the vast majority of the SF police force live outside of the communities they police in enclaves of white entitlement like Walnut Creek or Pleasanton. Teachers, on the other hand, yearn to stay in the neighborhoods where they teach but are called greedy by the capitalist establishment for wanting a salary or housing subsidies that make this possible. Given that teachers don’t protect the wealth the capitalists extract from working people, their unions are not held in the same esteem as police unions.
Revolutionaries in the U.S., the heart of the Empire, have a huge task ahead. Unlike Latin America, the social movements in the U.S. have not fully come to fruition. Our predecessors were viciously crushed in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, thanks to the rise of the anti-war movement, the Occupy movement and the anti-police brutality movement, non-bourgeois aligned progressive and revolutionary organizations are being created. We must build. We must expose the hypocrisy of the system and the real violence forced upon us by those who claim to uphold bourgeois “peace and laws.” We must win over the people who are now in motion to revolutionary organization. We must build leadership, not the bourgeois self-interested kind but the one that finds inspiration in and is accountable to the people. It may be years before our efforts build structures strong enough to effectively fight against the increasingly repressive state, but let us all remember that the inspirational Latin American left, which today holds power in a growing list of countries to the South, is the result of mass revolts by young angry revolutionaries who had hope and gave their lives for a better and more just future.
