VANESSA LEWIS
'We engage in every struggle against the state'
From a talk by Vanessa Lewis Dec. 6 to the New
York conference on the "Communist Manifesto in the
Age of Imperialism."
In the last few months we witnessed the unquestionably
racist police riot against Black youths at the Million Youth
March in New York City. The militaristic occupation of Harlem
and New York Mayor Giuliani's attempts to stop the march was a
glaring sign of how unabashedly reactionary this period has
become.
The murder of Matthew Shepard, and the massive
demonstrations that broke out all over the country, awoke a
flame in the lesbian, gay, bi and transgender communities and
their supporters. And the NYPD police repression against a
Shepard memorial march created a new consciousness among the
masses of how far the state would go to silence them.
This explosion of consciousness must be deepened. The ruling
class tries to dictate the world in which we live. The drive
for profit is the ends to which they will act; they will stop
at nothing to subjegate our class.
Ultimately they rule through repression, violence and
murder--pitting the media, the courts, the government, the
military, the police and the prison system against workers on
every front. In short, they rule through the state.
In the "Communist Manifesto," Marx defined the state--the
cops, courts, prisons and military--as the organ of class rule
for the oppression of one class by another. It is the creation
of an order that legitimizes and maintains oppression by
suppressing the inevitable conflict between the exploited
working class and the exploiter ruling class. This
"suppression" of the masses historically targets the most
oppressed peoples of the world.
In its quest for the cheapest labor, property, and the
expansion of the means of production, the U.S. ruling class
admits to no borders.
State occupies every continent
The imperialist state is evident in every continent on the
planet. Evident in Iraq, where U.S. oil interests have left a
nation savaged by war and its people subject to genocide by
sanctions. Evident in colonialized Puerto Rico, which is
becoming ground zero for imperialist interests in the western
hemisphere. Evident in the militarization of the U.S./Mexico
border, where immigrants are harassed, beaten and executed by
the INS.
The activities of the state's covert military forces and the
CIA have been the cornerstone of silencing political uprisings
of workers and oppressed peoples of the world in the last
century. These same agencies--along with the police--also take
care of "domestic upheaval." They are employed to introduce
drugs into our communities to make us complacent. And in times
of people's rebellion, these forces institute martial law to
subject us to a lockdown of our very lives.
The ruling class has forced millions of workers and
oppressed people to live under the constant terrorism of the
police. They criminalize and jail the people, particularly
Black and Latin youths--thereby creating concentration camps
for the poor.
State agencies have tried to infiltrate and smash the labor
movement, the civil rights movement, the lesbian, gay, bi and
trans movement, the women's movement, national liberation
movements and all revolutionary movements of resistance.
They, however, can never succeed because we always rise
again.
The fact of the matter is that they can never smash our
revolutionary movements, because it is the nature of the
working class to struggle. It is we who run the factories,
produce the wealth, even administer the government. It is
inevitable that we will use these skills to take back our very
lives.
Political prisoner brother Mumia Abu-Jamal is an example of
the struggle we are waging with the state, a struggle we must
win. As revolutionaries we know that Mumia's struggle embodies
all struggles for an end to state repression and legalized
terrorism. Youth and all poor and working people must answer
the call to save Mumia's life and end the racist death penalty.
We know they will join us on April 24 when we demonstrate in
Philadelphia, "Millions for Mumia" strong.
Mass mobilizations and struggles of the workers are critical
to winning our liberation. During these struggles we as
communists unite the struggles of all members of our class to
expose the state's purpose, and our class enemy.
The first attempt at a workers' state, made by members of
the Paris Commune in 1871, was crushed. Based on the lessons of
the Commune, Marx and Engels made the only addition to the
Manifesto. They stated that workers cannot just take control of
the capitalist state, but must destroy it. Lenin's "State and
Revolution" further explored this question.
It is necessary to create our own state to defend and
protect our interests of maintaining collective property for
the benefit of our class. We must replace the dictatorship of
the capitalist ruling class with a dictatorship of the workers
until our class enemy withers away into nothing. And at that
moment so will the necessity for a state.
As members of a Marxist-Leninist party, this is what we
intend to do.
We must rid ourselves of the ruling class, disarm their
military, special forces and police, destroy their propaganda
machines and miseducation system, disempower their elected
officials and courts and tear down their prisons. We must
further empower the masses with the workers' truth. We must
elect and arm our own class, at workers' wages, holding them
accountable only to us--the workers.
It is with this understanding that we engage in every
struggle against the state. In the Manifesto, Marx said the
"working class has no country." Here in the belly of the beast,
we have a special responsibility to smash the state apparatus
of the ruling class.
On to building the mass struggle to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
end the racist death penalty and build the "Millions for Mumia"
march in Philadelphia April 24.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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