Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May, the New York Times estimates some 2,500 protests sweeping across the US, drawing in tens of thousands of demonstrators. Horrified, President Trump said US cities are ‘far worse than Afghanistan’, and announced, ‘We’re sending law enforcement. We can’t let this happen to the cities.’ The anti-racist movement is heading for a major confrontation with the state and will feel the full force of the state’s tools of repression.
For seven weeks the people of Portland, Oregon protested at police brutality and systemic racism. Trump and his acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, sent in Federal agents. These forces are as much at home patrolling Baghdad as US cities; forces set up after 9/11, supposedly to fight terrorism, and to repel would-be migrants attempting to escape from Central America. It was Wolf who drew up the orders to separate migrant children in detention camps from their parents. Using tear gas and stun grenades, camouflaged agents without identification are bundling protesters into unmarked vans for interrogation. These methods are reminiscent of Chile, Argentina and Brazil nearly 50 years ago. Trump said, ‘They have really done a fantastic job in a short period of time. No problem. They grab a lot of people and jail the leaders.’ This is an endorsement of terror tactics employed by the US state on US people. On 22 July, the White House released plans to deploy Federal forces in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee. Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, will not be far behind.
Making gains
Industrial action has been inspired by the movement. International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers virtually shut down the western seaboard, walking out of 29 ports in solidarity with Black Lives Matter on 19 June (the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the US). Transit unions have refused to transport arrested protesters. On 20 July, 20,000 essential workers in 160 cities struck and demonstrated for racial and economic justice. This followed actions by workers at Amazon, Target and Instacart; teachers’ strikes are likely to follow if schools are forced to reopen (Counterpunch 24 July 2020).
Debate about abolishing the police has become commonplace, even in state legislatures. Minneapolis City Council voted to begin the process of dismantling the city’s police force, to replace it with ‘community-led’ alternatives (it is unclear what these will be). Cities across the country have announced cuts to their own police departments, and states like Colorado have passed reforms making many police practices (like chokeholds) illegal. Unprecedented charges have been levelled against killer cops, such as those who murdered George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. The Cops out of Schools movement has seen success as Minneapolis, San Francisco, Oakland and other cities end their contracts with police, removing them from schools.
Democrats manoeuvre
After the burning of Minneapolis’ Third Precinct police station on 28 May, surveys indicated 54% of US citizens believed the demonstrators were justified – a higher approval rating than for either Trump or Joe Biden. This was threatening for the state. The Democrat opposition began trying to redirect the anger on the streets towards polling booths. In the Senate, Democrats have presented the Justice in Policing Act, trailing behind radical voices in the protests. The goal of the Democratic liberal ‘left’ is to defang the protests of their militancy. The early demand of the movement, ‘abolish the police’, became ‘defund the police’; hand-wringing commentators were quick to assure one another that ‘defund’ only meant removing a small percentage of their money. As Martin Schoots-McAlpine put it, ‘a movement which began with the burning of a police station has been transformed into one of requesting minor amendments to municipal budgets’ (Monthly Review).
Making certain police procedures illegal or cutting their funding will not change the fundamental role of the police; they are violent defenders of private property and the ruling class. The widespread introduction of body-cameras in 2014, for instance, did nothing to reduce police violence. When Elijah McClain was murdered by three cops in Aurora, Colorado in August 2019, the officers did not let body-cameras stop them from asphyxiating the black 23-year-old, despite McClain begging them repeatedly for breath. The officers were acquitted of wrongdoing in the initial investigation due to lack of evidence. McClain’s case has recently been approved for re-examination, thanks to pressure from the street movement’s demand for justice.
Over 14,000 protesters have been arrested nationwide. Attacks against journalists have been widely documented. Databases compiled by Killed by Police and The Washington Post show that upwards of 120 people have been murdered by US police since the protests erupted in May.
The terror tactics are intended to isolate and target demonstrators, but in Portland this is having the opposite effect, with more local citizens joining the protests, outraged at the blatantly illegal tactics used against protesters. Democrats and opportunist elements will try and divert the movement off the streets, into the law courts and polling booths. These dead-end tactics must be resisted to build a movement which can destroy the racist foundations of the US. Trump has indicated that he will not leave the presidency, whatever the result of November’s election. It is not beyond Trump and his gang to provoke civil war. US people are rising against racism and injustice. This resistance has been inspiring to people across the world.
Joe Tyler and Trevor Rayne
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 277 August/September 2020
US imperialism and endless war
On 1 July 2020, the Joint Democratic and Republican House Armed Services Committee unanimously approved a record $740.5bn for military spending in the next year. This is three times more than China spends on its military and 15 times more than Russia; and it is more than the combined military spending of the next 15 countries.
Additionally, this Committee delayed Trump’s proposed troop withdrawal from Germany, and from the US’s 19-year war in Afghanistan following an agreement with the Taliban made in February. It ensured that Saudi Arabia can still bomb Yemen without an investigation, and it removed any restriction on the Trump administration from withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This unity of the two US main political parties, at a time of economic crisis, deepening poverty and Covid-19 sickness, demonstrates the nature of imperialism, terrorising any opponents to its global plunder, and its indifference to the working masses. It also tells us that individual presidents can say what they want, but that state monopoly capital – here in the form of the military-industrial complex – leads the show.
The momentum for this obsessive militarism has been spurred by anti-Russian stories. This useful foreign ‘enemy’ has been accused of promoting Trump, promoting Brexit, promoting Bernie Sanders, and paying the Taliban to shoot US troops (as if they needed motivation) and so on. That the key US strategic priority is now the Pacific is beside the point. It is China that is being targeted economically, hemmed in, away from western markets, but currently it would be undiplomatic to raise the question of open military conflict with China. Russia has been the ‘enemy’ since 1917, ingrained in the US ruling class’s anti-communist culture, and still serves its purpose. However, the weapons voted for in July will be used anywhere that US imperialism thinks necessary to maintain its current global position.
Alvaro Michaels
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 277 August/September 2020
Imperialist hands off Hong Kong
On 30 June, responding to the demonstrations and rioting that had struck Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) passed a new national security law for the territory. This law bans political agitation calling for independence for Hong Kong and any collusion with a foreign country or external elements endangering national security.
Last year’s demonstrations were primarily organised by capitalist interests, supported by pro-imperialist forces, initially to oppose a new extradition law with mainland China. Although the Hong Kong government withdrew the law in response to the protests, the demonstrations escalated, with calls for independence and attacks on symbols of the Chinese Communist Party. Sections of the demonstrators displayed British and US flags and called for either Britain or Trump to ‘save’ Hong Kong, alongside chauvinist slurs against mainland Chinese people. (See FRFI 272 October/November 2019, ‘Hong Kong’s misdirected protests’).
The response of British imperialism to the PRC’s actions was contrived outrage expressed with characteristic arrogance. Boris Johnson condemned the law for supposedly breaking the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which laid the grounds for Britain quitting Hong Kong in 1997; the territory had been occupied by Britain since 1841. Johnson hypocritically declared: ‘It violates Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and threatens the freedoms and rights protected by the joint declaration’. ‘Freedoms and rights’ were alien for Hong Kong under British colonial rule with no local elected representatives and repression for campaigners for the reunification of Hong Kong and the PRC. The Royal Hong Kong Police was a paramilitary colonial force, which enforced imperialist rule by terror.
The British government then announced, in a blatant attempt to destabilise Hong Kong society, that nearly three million Hong Kong citizens would be eligible to apply for residency in Britain. This includes the 350,000 who hold British National Overseas (BNO) passports issued before the 1997 handover and over 2.5 million who are eligible to apply for a BNO passport. There would be no income test for these immigrants and after five years they would be able to apply for settled status and then citizenship. A stark contrast to the dehumanising racist regime that usually faces migrants and refugees who manage to enter Britain.
Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy supported the Conservative government’s proposals, then went further, calling on the government to force the UN to investigate police brutality in Hong Kong. She called on the government to re-examine its whole commercial relationship with China.
In response to these provocations the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming, accused Britain of gross interference in Hong Kong affairs stating, ‘Some of the politicians in the UK still have this very strong colonial mindset. They fail to recognise that Hong Kong is no longer under the British colonial rule!’
The British government’s artificial outrage over China stamping down on violent protests in Hong Kong is fuelled by its need to ally its economic interests ever more closely with those of US imperialism which is engaged in an escalating trade war with China. This alignment was drawn closer with the 14 July decision to bar the Chinese company Huawei from Britain’s 5G telecommunications network. It was only in January that Johnson had pushed through parliament the decision that Huawei could participate in the development of the 5G network. This has now been reversed mainly because of pressure from the US, pressure which includes sanctions against Huawei, preventing it buying US software and technology.
Labour’s response has been to criticise the government from the right, accusing it of not taking ‘National Security’ seriously enough and not barring Huawei earlier. Shadow Minister for Industrial Strategy, Chi Onwurah, declared, ‘It has been clear for some time that there are serious questions over whether Huawei should be allowed to control large sections of our country’s telecoms network – yet the government refused to face reality…Their approach to our 5G capability, Huawei and national security has been incomprehensibly negligent.’
For the Labour Party it is natural to want to strengthen and defend the ‘national security’ of the British imperialist state. It sees no contradiction in simultaneously condemning the PRC for defending its own national security and territorial integrity against attempts by imperialism to drive a wedge between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.
Bob Shepherd
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 277 August/September 2020
