We need to go beyond protest

Words such as “civil rights” and “social accountability” empty of meaning. Language is being twisted where a country abusing its own people is defined as “free” and “democratic”. The streets in the U.S. cities are full of protests and demonstrations. A substantial proportion of the population are at breaking-point. One man’s death has triggered an avalanche of anger. The United States is now teetering on the edge of open revolt. Police have opened fire with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls and have used nightsticks and shields to attack the working people. National Guardsmen have been mobilised and regular US army troops placed on stand-by.

But socialists know that revolutions are difficult in that they must chip away at hundreds of years of a mind-set that say inequality is normal and that we have to build the material foundations for a new society. The class struggle is to defend the precious gains of the poor against the plutocrats and oligarchs of the ruling class and it is long and hard. American culture has long suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: we look to the rich for answers to the very problems they are often responsible for creating and from which they benefit. 

"The United States has never adequately come to terms with the horrific legacy of two and a half centuries of chattel slavery," reads a report from the International Crisis Group, non-partisan and non-profit group, which works "to prevent wars" and "build a more peaceful world" . "Nor has it healed or conquered the institutionalized violence and racism toward African Americans that followed their emancipation in the 1860s." Jim Crow laws, decades of lynchings, segregation in schools and workplaces, and "glaring structural inequalities" in healthcare, housing, and education have followed, the group wrote, adding: “Against this backdrop, police brutality toward black men and women has been both a chronic problem and a recurrent source of instability in U.S. cities.”

The ruling class has been looting from  working people every single day of our lives. Looting from the labour of white, black and brown male and female workers. Robbing working people, and always the hardest hit people among them, of decent schools, of comfortable homes and envionment friendly communities. They have stolen our labor, our health, and our lives. Even during this deadly pandemic, a handful of billionaires have already looted $434 billion while working people continue to suffer.

If we’ve learned anything from history, it is that we failed to turn events into true transformation and liberation for people. Wall Street’s the ruling elite has been able to disunite working people. We have to unite together against our common oppression and exploitation to realize our revolution.