Sponsored by the International Socialist Organization

1. COPS,CLASS&RACECOPS,CLASS&RACE
SPONSORED BY: THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION | SOCIALISTWORKER.ORG | INTERNATIONALSOCIALIST.ORGISO

2. MARXISM & LIBERATION

3. STRUGGLES AGAINST OPPRESSION
MUST BE LED BY THE OPPRESSED.
But it is not necessary to personally experience a
form of oppression in order to fight it.
In fact, though consciousness varies wildly, the
entire working class has an objective interest (and
a duty) in ending racism, sexism, homophobia, and
all oppressions.

4. MARX, ENGELS, LENIN, TROTSKY & LUXEMBURG
Harry Haywood
Black Panthers
Paul Robeson
A. Philip Randolph
W.E.B. Du Bois
Claudia Jones
Lucy Parsons
Amiri Baraka
Angela Davis
Langston Hughes
Ralph Ellison
Frantz Fanon
Kwame Nkrumah
Amílcar Cabral
Patrice Lumumba
Walter Rodney
Malcolm X
C.L.R. James

5. MARXISM: THE BEST TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING
& ENDING ALL OPPRESSIONS
Marxism seeks not to separate exploitation from
issues of oppression, but to show how they are
connected and how the solution to one cannot be
separated from the solution to the other. Socialism is
not only a theory of the liberation of the working
class. It is a theory of the liberation of the working
class as the foundation for the liberation of all of
humanity.
REVOLUTIONS: “Festivals of the oppressed & exploited.”

6. THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM

7. “Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail.”
Yes, accountability is a good place to start.
“Not all cops.” Yes, all cops.
Not just about individual racist, violent cops
engaging in misconduct, but about systemic
problems with law enforcement and the law:
The War on Drugs, stop-and-frisk, “broken
windows,” over-policing, criminalizing poverty,
racial profiling, mass incarceration, mass
surveillance, erosion of privacy rights, mandatory
minimum sentencing, school-to-prison pipeline,
torture, police militarization, etc.

8. Not just law enforcement and the law.
These issues go to the core of U.S. society. We
must expand our focus to include all institutions
of corporate-state power and cultural institutions
that provide ideological support.

9. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE
OF THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM?

10. CONNECT THE DOTS
RACIST
POLICE
VIOLENCE
THE WAR
ON TERROR
INCOME
INEQUALITY
INDIGENOUS
RIGHTS
STUDENT
DEBT
GENDER
INEQUALITY
ECOLOGICAL
DESTRUCTION
ANTI-
IMMIGRANT
FERVOR
MASS
INCARCERATION

11. “The problem of racism, the problem of economic
exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied
together. These are the triple evils that are
interrelated.”–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
ONE STRUGGLE,
MANY FRONTS

12. “Working-class
consciousness cannot be
genuine political
consciousness unless the
workers are trained to
respond to all cases of
tyranny, oppression, violence
and abuse, no matter what
class is affected–unless they
are trained, moreover, to
respond from a Social-
Democratic point of view
and no other.”–V.I. Lenin
THE POLITICS
OF SOLIDARITY

13. THE STATE

14. When human societies developed
large-scale agriculture, classes emerged.
A LABORING OPPRESSED CLASS
THAT PRODUCED THE SURPLUS
AN IDLE RULING CLASS
THAT APPROPRIATED THE SURPLUS

15. With class division came the
rise of states–bodies of armed
men and bureaucracies–to
buttress this division with…
++
IDEAS
FORCE

16. Many radicals oppose the state,
but we need to go deeper.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE STATE?
WHO DOES IT SERVE?

17. States have grown in complexity and vary in
character, but they all have the same purpose:
to repress the majority in the interest of the minority.
THE STATE IS A TOOL FOR PRESERVING CLASS RULE.
To facilitate and preserve the profit system.
To guarantee and make efficient the ruling class’
ability to exploit the oppressed class.
The state creates an order, which legalizes and
perpetuates this oppression by moderating the
conflict between irreconcilably antagonistic classes.

18. IDEAS
Ideological support for the status quo
is taught via a network of state,
corporate, and cultural institutions.
Schools, religious organizations, the
news media, fiction, cinema, etc.
Socializing people for their place in society.
“The poor are lazy. The rich earned it.”
“We need a strong military to defend us.”
“Western civilization is the pinnacle of
human achievement.”

19. Force “consists not merely of armed men but also of
material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of
coercion of all kinds.”
The police and the military are the chief
instruments of state power.
These “special bodies of armed men”
grow proportionally stronger as class
antagonisms within the state become
more acute.
FORCE

20. ++
IDEAS
FORCE
MYTHOLOGY
RELIGION
PHILOSOPHY
SCIENCE
CULTURE
TRADITIONS
MEDIA
ARTS EDUCATION
BELIEFS
LAWS
POLICE
MILITARY
PRISONS
GOVERNMENT
COURT SYSTEM
STATE-FUNDED TERRORISTS
VIGILANTES
PRIVATE SECURITY FORCES
CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS
MORALITY

22. COPS

23. OUR FUNDAMENTAL ANTAGONISM IS WITH THE RULING CLASS.
THE STATE IS THEIR TOOL.
THE POLICE ARE THE TIP OF THEIR SPEAR.

24. The ruling class created the modern police in the
early-to-mid 1800s, not to stop crime or promote
justice, but to control large defiant crowds:
IN THE NORTH: Strikes and riots
IN THE SOUTH: Slave insurrections

25. Cops do not neutrally enforced the law
(and the law itself has never been neutral).
IN THE NORTH: They arrested people for the vaguely
defined crime of disorderly conduct and vagrancy
throughout the nineteenth century. Arrested
anyone they saw as a threat to order.
IN THE SOUTH: They enforced white supremacy and
arrested black people on trumped-up charges in
order to feed them into convict labor systems.

26. LAW ENFORCEMENT IS ALWAYS SELECTIVE.
THE POLICE ARE ALWAYS PROFILING WHAT PART OF THE
POPULATION AND WHICH KINDS OF BEHAVIOR TO TARGET.

27. Law enforcement must be viewed in the context of
the greater ruling-class project:
To manage and shape the working class.
To protect capitalism from the threat posed
by its offspring, the working class. To oppose its
political advancement.
To use violence to reconcile electoral
democracy with industrial capitalism.
To enforce order among those with the most
reason to resent the system–disproportionately
poor Black people.
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28. To inflict nonlethal violence upon crowds to break
them up while deliberately trying to avoid creating
martyrs. Any force organized to deliver routine
violence is going to kill people. For every police
murder, there are thousands of nonlethal acts of
police violence, calculated to intimidate while
avoiding an angry collective response.
Maximum control with minimum violence.
But cops don’t need to be careful because they
are rarely held accountable for their actions
–especially against people of color, whose lives
have been devalued by racist ideology.
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29. IDEAS
“Police keep the peace.”
“We need police to protect us from
each other, due to our violent,
dishonest human nature.”
“Police are heroes with very dangerous jobs.”
“A few bad apples spoil the bunch.”
“We are a nation of laws.”

30. IDEAS
COPS & ROBBERS: Dividing society
between good guys and bad guys is
perfect for identifying scapegoats,
especially racial ones.
This moralistic scheme is a direct competitor
to a class-conscious worldview, which
identifies society’s basic antagonism as the
conflict between exploiters and exploited.
Police activity thus teaches an ideology of citizenship
that dovetails with the lessons of the classroom and
the workplace.

31. “GOOD COPS” PROVIDE
PR COVER FOR THE
BRUTAL WORK THAT
NEEDS TO BE DONE BY
THE “BAD COPS.”

32. JOHN STEINBECK:
“Socialism never took root in America
because the poor see themselves not as an
exploited proletariat but as temporarily
embarrassed millionaires.”
SIMILARLY:
Opposition to the police never took root in
America because people see the police not
as armed guardians of capital but as
temporarily confused workers.

33. ARE COPS WORKING CLASS?
Cops come from working-class backgrounds, but
are grafted onto the ruling class to act as their
enforcers. Cops are professional class traitors.

34. We need to eradicate the liberal notion that if we
articulate our grievances precisely enough the police
won’t bash our heads in.
WE CAN’T REASON WITH CLASS RULE.
Cops who quit or turn in other cops for misconduct
have no effect on the structural nature of law
enforcement as the guard of the ruling class.

35. RACE & RACISM

36. “You can’t have capitalism
without racism.”–Malcolm X

37. Because capitalism enriches a minority that live off
the majority's labor, it requires various tools to divide
the majority—racism and all oppressions under
capitalism serve this purpose.
Oppressions are intersectional, reinforcing and
compounding each other.
CLASS OPPRESSION IS THE PIVOT AROUND WHICH
ALL OTHER INEQUALITIES AND OPPRESSIONS TURN.
To understand intersectionality is not enough. We
must understand the root of all oppressions.

38. RACISM IS NOT AN END IN ITSELF.
RACISM IS A LYNCHPIN OF U.S. CAPITALISM.

39. Many radicals oppose white supremacist racism,
but we need to go deeper.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF RACISM?
WHO DOES IT SERVE?

40. RACISM’S FUNCTION:
To justify plunder, conquest, slavery,
and inequality.
To divide and conquer. To impede class unity.
To pit one section of the working class
against another.
To blunt class consciousness. To cause
confusion as to who our allies and enemies are.
To obscure our place in history and the
current landscape.
To reduce wages and benefits for all workers.
To better exploit the entire working class.
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41. Under capitalism, all workers are exploited. Some
workers face added oppression because of racism,
sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant ideas, religious
oppression, etc.
Racism has real material consequences. In every
measure of the quality of life in the U.S., whites are
on the top and Blacks are on the bottom.
White workers confer benefits from racism–and the
illusion that the system is working for
them–otherwise racism would not work at dividing
Black and white workers.

42. But… as Black living standards fall, downward
pressure is exerted on the living standards of the
entire working class.
Bosses are the biggest beneficiaries of race-based
wage disparities and decreased wages across the
entire working class.

43. To the extent that they accept white supremacy
and fail to unite with their class allies (of all
races, nationalities, genders, etc.), white
workers contribute to capitalism's ability to
exploit them more effectively.
RACISM IS CENTRAL TO THE OPPRESSION
OF THE WHITE WORKING CLASS.

44. “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish
worker as a competitor who lowers his standard
of life. … This antagonism is the secret of the
impotence of the English working class, despite
its organization. It is the secret by which the
capitalist maintains its power.”–Karl Marx

45. “The hostility between the whites and blacks of the
South is easily explained. … masters secured their
ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks
by putting enmity between them. They divided both to
conquer each. …By the rich slave-master, they [poor
whites] are already regarded as but a single remove
from equality with the slave.”–Frederick Douglass

46. “The race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing
to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness
impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers
could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the
Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South
made impossible.”–W.E.B. Du Bois

47. CAPITALISM HAS GIVEN RISE TO IDEOLOGIES
THAT JUSTIFY, EXPLAIN, AND PERPETUATE IT.
IN THE U.S., RACISM IS ONE OF THE MOST
IMPORTANT OF THESE IDEOLOGIES.

48. “THE IDEAS OF THE RULING CLASS ARE IN
EVERY EPOCH THE RULING IDEAS.”–Karl Marx
They use “the means of mental production” to
present the capitalist system as the highest ideal,
to perpetuate ideas of a violent, competitive,
sexist, racist, and immutable human nature, and
to make class divisions seem natural and the way
things have always been.

49. COPS ENFORCE THE RULING IDEAS.
Cops ensure the maintenance of the dominant
material relations through the enforcement of
private property, debt collection, regulation of
“moral conduct” and drug laws (so workers
remain a valuable to their bosses), and the
appropriation of wealth from and general
harassment of people of color and the poor.

50. SURPLUS POPULATIONS ARE
A NECESSARY BY-PRODUCT OF CAPITALISM.
MARX CALLED THEM “THE RESERVE ARMY OF LABOR.”

51. Especially since capitalists began depending on the
labor of more vulnerable foreign workers, massive
racialized sections of the U.S. working class have no
role in the economy. In other words, no ability to
produce wealth for the ruling class.
WHAT TO DO WITH SUPERFLUOUS, EXPENDABLE PEOPLE?
Ghettoization & Gentrification.
The poor serve as a threatening reminder to the
employed and to keep their wages down.

52. THE CRIME-CONTROL INDUSTRY
While crime rates are at historic lows:
» Public perception of crime is high and very racist.
» Mass incarceration is on a scale unequaled in
the world today or throughout human history.
Prisons turn surplus populations into profit-centers.
Transfer wealth from working people to the
prison-industrial complex. Prison labor.
Police as military occupiers of U.S. cities. Decreased
working class living standards. Underfunded schools.
Massive increase in wealth of ruling class.

53. “We do not fight racism with racism. We fight
racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative
capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism
with basic socialism.”–Fred Hampton

54. REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

55. We support genuine reforms. But the term “reform”
is often applied to entrenchment of the status quo.
And toothless or surface reforms are often used as
pacification tools to diffuse popular movements.
REFORMS WILL NEVER GET AT THE ROOT OF OUR PROBLEMS.
Exploitation and oppressions are built into the very
nature of capitalism. They are not determined by
and cannot be eliminated by decisions of the
capitalist class, by police officers, by politicians, or
by laws of the state. They cannot be politely or
gradually reformed away.

56. Demands from the national leadership of the Black
Lives Matter movement combine near-term reforms
and goals that would require the wholesale
dismantling of core U.S. institutions.
RACISM CANNOT BE ELIMINATED
WITHOUT ELIMINATING CAPITALISM.
THE POLICE CANNOT BE SUFFICIENTLY REFORMED.
As revolutionaries, we have ambitious goals!
But we must work toward them by doing what we can
in the here and now.

57. Reform and revolution are not opposed to each other,
but intertwined. Struggle for reform is key because:
» Only mass, militant struggle can win reforms.
The biggest reforms come when the ruling class
feels its control over society and its institutions are
most threatened.
» Ordinary people come together and get radicalized.
» Only through struggle for reform—and any struggle
short of revolution is a struggle for reform—is it
possible to move beyond reform to seek revolution.

58. THE PRIMACY OF PROTEST
Pressure from below forces elected officials and
bosses to accept reform.
Mass demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and
uprisings mobilize and organize the power of the
people–critical to building a revolutionary movement.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FERGUSON: RESISTANCE.

59. “POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND.”
–Frederick Douglass

60. BIBLIOGRAPHY
State & Revolution by Vladimir Lenin The German Ideology by Karl Marx
What is to Be Done? by Vladimir Lenin Where Do We Go From Here? By Martin Luther King Jr.
Origins of the Police by David Whitehouse The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen
Where We Stand: The Politics of the ISO The Politics of Identity by Sharon Smith
Who Killed Eric Garner? by Salar Mohandesi Pyramid of the Capitalist System by Speldwright
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels
Race, Class & Marxism by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People by Sam Mitrani
Five Liberal Tendencies that Plagued Occupy by Juan Conatz
Malcolm X on Capitalism and Socialism by the Socialist Organizer
Police Reform is Impossible in America by Donovan X. Ramsey
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser
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