Revolution #72, December 10, 2006
Statement from RCP New York Branch
JUSTICE FOR SEAN BELL!
50 MORE REASONS—WE NEED REVOLUTION
What do the police see when they see three young Black and Latino men in a Nissan Altima? A target. Doesn’t matter if you have a PhD or work at McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing something desperate to survive or if you are trying to stay off the streets.
Sean Bell was going to marry Nicole Paultre on November 25. They were getting ready to start a life together with their two young children, thinking of moving south, out of the city. Instead, Sean was killed when the police fired a rain of 50 bullets into his car as he and his friends drove away from his bachelor party. It doesn’t matter what Sean Bell was doing—he and his friends were Driving While Black. One of the cops who shot into the car emptied his gun and reloaded and kept firing. Sean’s two friends who survived, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman, were handcuffed to their hospital beds until outraged visitors intervened.
Why does this keep happening—in New York and all over the country? Why does it happen with white cops, Black cops, Latino cops? Under white mayors, Black mayors, Latino mayors; with Democratic administrations, Republican administrations? Why does it keep happening—under “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani who displayed nothing but contempt for Black people when he was the Mayor of New York and is now considered “viable” presidential material, and under the supposedly more “fair-minded” Mayor Bloomberg, who rushed to express “condolences”?
ENOUGH. We don’t need condolences and justifications for crimes that are intolerable and inexcusable in the first place. We need this to stop. And there is only one way this will ever be ended for real: revolution. Such a revolution is possible, once the right conditions develop. Once there is a major, qualitative change in the nature of the objective situation, where all of society is in a profound crisis, owing fundamentally to the nature and workings of the system itself—and along with that there is the emergence of a revolutionary people, numbering in the millions and millions, conscious of the need for revolutionary change and determined to fight for it.
Think about how we got here with our hearts full of pain. We live under a capitalist system that first flourished in the “new world” of the Americas on the blood of slaves stolen from Africa and Native Americans sent to their deaths in silver mines. Children who didn’t work hard enough in the mines had their hands cut off. Slaves who tried to escape had their achilles tendons cut so they couldn’t try to walk away again—but they could still work in the fields.
The blood of slaves flows down into the veins of modern-day global capitalism and imperialism—joined by the blood of child prostitutes in Thailand and rug-weavers in Asia who never see daylight, joined by the blood of whole families and villages wiped out in Africa for lack of the AIDS drugs locked up by pharmaceutical companies calculating profit and loss balance sheets. Joined by the blood of 100s of 1000s of Iraqis killed in an American war and occupation to remake the world for this global capitalist empire. Bishop Lester Williams, who was going to marry Sean Bell and Nicole Paultre and now is burying Sean, called his death an execution, and said to the New York Times: “It’s little Iraq, I’m sorry, especially toward the Blacks in the community. We don’t feel protected.”
This system is what the police exist to “serve and protect.” They are nothing but modern-day slave-catchers for a system of profit based on the exploitation of people here and around the world who have nothing to lose and can only live through selling their work—when they can get work. The master’s whip has been replaced by the NYPD standard issue semi-automatic and they gun people down again and again, until it seems like we can’t have any more tears left. This is why this keeps happening, no matter how many Black and Latino cops get hired and no matter how much “diversity training” they get and no matter how “sensitive” the mayor is.
Today, a “leaner and meaner” globalized American empire ships whole factories across the globe to more brutally use people in every corner of the world, and millions of Black people and others who can’t be profitably exploited fill the prison growth industry in the U.S. Right-wing religious fanatics like Pat Robertson and others close to, or in, positions of power, contemplate Biblical punishment for those they consider a “stain” on society. Thousands died in Hurricane Katrina and thousands more were separated from families as they were removed from New Orleans—not because of a natural disaster but because of a criminal regime. Meanwhile the President can now legally put anyone he decides is an “enemy combatant” in secret prisons, to be tortured, for the rest of their lives.
If you think Black people and those on the bottom of society have always caught hell and it couldn’t get any worse, think again. A core of the ruling circles in this country is following the logic of genocide.
But slaves can resist and rebel and rise up. Empires can lose wars and empires can fall. And history has shown that the situation of millions of Black and other oppressed people is like a volcano at the foundation of the U.S. empire. Where will liberation come from? Not from getting on our knees to imaginary gods. We need to start lifting our heads. We need massive political resistance to all the outrages of this system, we need to prepare minds and organize forces politically. This is how the ground would be prepared for a proletarian revolution that would have a serious chance of winning, a revolution with a backbone of millions, of all nationalities, with nothing to lose—a revolution that has an answer to this deeply hated, centuries-old oppression that this system can never have.
Think about what it would be like if the power of a revolutionary state was in the hands of the masses of people, and the state apparatus backed them up in doing away with every remnant of oppression. The people’s police would handle any of these situations totally differently from the enforcers in this society. Our Chairman, Bob Avakian, has said that in a revolutionary socialist society, “We would sooner have one of our own people’s police killed than go wantonly murder one of the masses. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re actually trying to be a servant of the people. You go there and put your own life on the line, rather than just wantonly murder one of the people.”
Such a revolution is possible. Many groups of people protest and rebel against things this system does, and these protests and rebellions should be supported and strengthened. Yet only those with nothing to lose but their chains can be the backbone of a struggle to actually overthrow this system and create a new system that will put an end to exploitation and help pave the way to a whole new world.
Such a revolution is possible. There is a political Party that can lead such a struggle, a political Party that speaks and acts for those with nothing to lose but their chains: the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. This party has the vision, the program, the leadership, and the organizational principles to unite those who must be united and enable them to do what must be done.
Such a revolution is possible. All those with a burning desire to see a drastic change for the better; all those who dare to dream and to act to bring about a completely new and better world: Support this Party, join this Party, spread its message and its organized strength, and prepare the ground for a revolutionary rising that has a solid base and a real chance of winning.
Check out the writings and works of Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist party. Read and distribute the RCP’s REVOLUTION newspaper. Get organized with the revolutionary movement. Become an emancipator of humanity.
The Revolutionary Communist Party New York Branch
November 29, 2006
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