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By Jamal Rich
Since the Trayvon Martin murder in 2012 and the Ferguson uprising in 2014, the Movement for Black Lives has further developed its demands from so-called ‘reformist’ reforms such as new police training methods, “community policing,” body cameras, and diversity in hiring to a more militant stance of defunding and eventually abolishing the police in the aftermath of the most recent violent police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
How did we get here? Anti-Black racism and settler colonialism are built into the very foundation of our society, giving rise to a white supremacist superstructure. This means that the struggles against racism and capitalism are separate but intertwined, parallel (but not identical) fights that together move toward a just future. The revolutionary V.I. Lenin saw the struggle for democracy indivisibly bound up with the struggle against racism and class and national oppression. He said the fight for democracy was key to advancing unity among the workers of the oppressor nation and the people of any oppressed nation or nationality.
Henry Winston, a former chair of the Communist Party USA, said that from its inception, his organization saw the struggle against racist oppression as part of the class struggle and recognized that Black people were oppressed as a people. “Labor with a white skin and labor with a Black skin,” Winston said in his book Strategy for a Black Agenda, “could not be free unless the special demands of the triply-oppressed Black people were put at the center of the struggle for progress and socialism.”
Following the end of chattel slavery and the expansion of industrial capitalism to the U.S. South, new ways of sustaining the essence of slavery emerged in order to keep profits in the hands of the ruling class. Such means included the penal and convict lease systems and the modern prison-industrial complex, which now contains the largest prison population in the world and holds one-third of Black men (and increasingly Black women, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks) under its control.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis explains that, with the U.S. and global capitalist economy driven by pursuit of profit and, in recent decades, the dismantling of the welfare state, “poor people’s abilities to survive became increasingly constrained by...
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