Mass demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd

The crisis shakes the center of world capitalism

            Massive demonstrations are shaking the main cities of the United States since the night of Thursday, May 28. The racial murder perpetrated by Minnesota police against George Floyd is not the first of these crimes, which as early as under Obama’s administration had its response in the Black Lives Matter movement, central protagonist in the current mobilizations. In many cities, in addition to claiming for Floyd's life, the protesters are raising banners with other cases of murders of local Black youth and workers, such as David Smith, Jamar Clark, Breonna Taylor and Philando Castile. The situation in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis (Minnesota) and St. Paul (Wisconsin), the site of the crime and epicenter of the protests, has taken on semi-insurrectionary proportions of elemental forces, of a spontaneous nature. This has led the Democratic governor of Minnesota to mobilize the national guard and call for the intervention of federal army troops.

            The racial oppression of Black people in the U.S. is an old problem that capitalism has proven unable to solve. The abolition of slavery after the civil war in the 19th century only opened the door to full capitalist development, without providing a political or social way out for the African-American population. This, like so many other problems, will remain unresolved under imperialism, which, as Trotsky said, is incapable of carrying its tendencies to the end, accumulating contradictions like geological layers under the iron domination of the bourgeoisie and its state.

Catalyst

            As in other opportunities, the accumulation of contradictions in the economic and social basis of capitalism explode due to contingent events, which act as a catalyst for the tendencies of the exploited and oppressed to fight to reverse the desperate situation to which they are dragged by the rottening of imperialism. Perhaps this is the case with the response to Floyd's savage murder: it not only brings back to the forefront the struggle of Black people against State oppression, against police abuse, violence and murder, it shows that many of the movements that emerged in the heat of the 2008 crisis keep their strength, as Black Lives Matter does. The spontaneous demonstrations, the attacks against the repressive forces, are also an expression of a response of the youth and the working class to the situation generated by the present crisis, enhanced and accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. The destruction of 50 million jobs in the last few months shows the reality of the "job growth" that Obama and Trump sold in the last few years: completely precarious jobs, without any kind of stability, that today throw almost a quarter of the population of the country into unemployment. The current mobilizations have also been nurtured by a wave of strikes against the consequences of the crisis, in different companies, large and small, from coast to coast, from south to north of the United States. Many of them are led by minority and immigrant workers, many of them with trade union organizations with Spanish names. And this is not uncommon considering that the most dangerous and precarious jobs are those that all over the world the employers and their States call the "front line" and throw like cannon fodder to work without the minimum conditions of security and labor health during the pandemic. Nor is it curious that a percentage that does not fit the minority status of blacks or Latinos are the populations mainly affected by the COVID19.

            But not only these communities are part of the struggle. Because it’s a spontaneous movement with confusion of objectives, without a clear direction, but it does show that the Democratic Party, which did everything to absorb into its left wing, Democratic Socialism, the inorganic movements that emerged from the previous crisis, has not been able to contain the current explosion, aimed even against its own governors and mayors as is the case of Minnesota and its capital city.

Imperialist Decay

            The imposing outburst of contradictions accumulated over decades in the depths of capitalism threatens to wreck the last imperialist project to try to recover U.S. world hegemony: Trumpism. The leaps forward that Trump is trying to take in the face of the crisis, in all its aspects, whether it be underestimating the problem of the pandemic, with its struggle for the factories to work whatever it takes and the withdrawal of the country from the WHO; in the economic field, with the rescue packages for the big companies and the escalation of the confrontations with China and the imperialist competitors; and in the specific case of the current mass agitations, provoking the demonstrators with racist slogans and bullet threats, are the natural responses of Trumpism as a project. It is clear that a growing section of the imperialist bourgeoisie has taken note and is moving into opposition, in an attempt to revive the candidacy of the drooping Biden, who no one knows what he represents or what program he proposes, but who is seen as an alternative. The last to jump on Biden's bandwagon were the AFL-CIO union bureaucrats, who formally endorsed his candidacy on May 26^th. One question remains: Is Trump, and the new imperialist orientation that underpins him as a project, colliding with the limits of the U.S. as a power charged with leading capitalism into the worst phase of its decay? The truth is that the division in the bourgeoisie is clearly trying to prepare the changeover, but with enormous difficulties. Not only the mobilized masses but also the imperialist political staff itself, with Trump at the lead, are questioning the institutions of imperialist democracy, fighting over the form of the vote, something very dangerous considering that at the end of the year they have to go to the polls to define the person in charge of leading the country's destiny in an abrupt turn towards greater state intervention in the domestic, but also world, economy.

For a proletarian leadership

            The world crisis we are living through, with prospects of economic depression, layoffs, suspensions, massive unemployment, health catastrophes such as those experienced by Brazil and the U.S. itself, is just beginning. And yet, there are already massive demonstrations questioning the bourgeois staff that lead the States and their different recipes to give a capitalist, that is, a reactionary, way out. These segments of the masses, although with confused objectives, have been accumulating a previous experience, which includes the policies of co-optation of the counterrevolutionary leaderships, which wear all kinds of clothes like Democratic Socialism and Bernie Sanders in the U.S., and the different versions of the reformism without reforms of European social-imperialism. At the same time, the working class, in more localized experiences, more or less molecular, although sometimes of national scale as in the case of the general strike in Italy or some industry struggles in the U.S. itself, has been making a parallel (and intertwined with those processes) experience of struggle and union organization against the reform policies of imperialism to try to advance on our labor gains, and change in their favor the capital-labor relationship. On these elements and these experiences, we revolutionaries bet on setting in motion the transitional program between this rotten system and the political domination of the proletariat through its dictatorship. A workers' program that will allow the best elements of the vanguard to unify themselves in order to provide the wage-earning masses and the oppressed people with a leadership that will lead them to victory. We fight for the punishment of the murderers of George Floyd and all the victims of imperialist State apparatus. We fight so that Black people can decide their fate. Trusting that the way forward is the struggle against the social basis of that oppression, the expropriation of the expropriators, to put in place a Federation of Socialist Republics of America, where we will lay the basis for ending all forms of national and racial oppression by destroying bourgeois domination and wage labor exploitation.