It is now more than George Floyd

Across America, one city after another, spreading like a wildfire across the nation, working people have braved tear gas, pepper spray, and police clubs as well as mass arrests to the mostly non-violent challenge to racist police violence. In the main, peaceful protesters are being violently attacked by police across the country today. Socialists know the pain and frustrations of those who are sick and tired of being sick and tired. Enough is enough, fellow-workers, let us fight the real enemy. Are we forever bound to a system of oppressor and oppressed? For far too long, the voice of the workers has gone unheard. Not just black lives are slowly being sucked dry by the unfairness and injustice of the capitalist system. Working people are beginning to understand that this system— the capitalist system - increasingly rewards the wealthy and ignores the rest of us. Members of the working class of all colors of all genders, of all ages today know their lives are being destroyed more insidiously, step by step, year by year, as they struggle to survive. Our fellow-workers are being laid off moving from one low-paid job to another, lacking minimal health benefits, acquiring debt upon debt, changing apartment to apartment as rents keep rising, with no hope of ever achieving a decent secure family life, of ever paying off the accumulative loans, at a time that corporations are registering record profits, wealthy investors benefiting from stock buybacks and dividend payouts and while all the time the rich are getting richer.

The murder of George Floyd and the institutionalized racism of the police are merely the tip of the iceberg. There’s a deeper frustration and desperation behind it all, affecting tens of millions. The protests are an eruption of social solidarity among wide sections of American workers. Not just among black, or brown or white workers but all workers. What the protests show is that the working class is coming together. They are fearful of police brutality but equally fearful of being condemned to a life of low-paid, no benefits, insecure and futureless part-time and temp work. Working often two and even three jobs just to get by.  There is a growing awareness of a deepening political and economic crisis across America. Covid-19 and climate change is heightening these fears. The protesters know this. They sense and feel it and are growing frustrated, angry and desperate. It’s no longer about George Floyd any more. Organization is needed as well, an independent political movement, with a grass roots  structure,  in order to expand and build the protests and demonstrations, and to ensure they continue with ever larger turnouts.

Fight the power of the ruling class. America needs much deeper, radical and systemic change than any cosmetic reform to its coercive forces. By pitting people against one another it blinds most people from seeing who the real enemy is. It is extremely unlikely that anyone in power will have a problem with the military enforcing ruling class rule if the perfect storm of the pandemic, massive unemployment, evictions, hunger, racism and police brutality pushes the situation in the streets closer to the brink. Indeed, the boardrooms of Wall St will join together in their demand troops restore the ruling class version of law and order, no matter what party they claim allegiance to. Despite that, we shall build a better world.

“I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”- Mark Twain (Autobiography, Vol. 3)