In the early hours of 1 January, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black man who had been out
celebrating the New Year, was killed by a member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
police in Oakland, California. Cell phone footage of the murder revealed that Grant, who
was unarmed and lying face-down on the ground, was shot in the back by Johannes Mehserle,
a 27-year-old white cop.
While police initially refused to arrest Mehserle, the mass outrage following
circulation of cell phone images of the execution made it impossible for state authorities
to ignore the crime. On 13 January, Mehserle was arrested and subsequently released on
bail. Prior to Mehserle’s arrest, Oakland police viciously attacked a 7 January
demonstration and arrested 100 of those protesting the racist killing of Grant.
While every leftist in the Bay Area supports the demand for immediately dropping all
charges against the arrested protesters, the former Trotskyists of the Spartacist League
(SL) apparently think that it is a mistake to call for jailing Mehserle. In a 12 January
statement they wrote:
“At the Oakland protest [on 7 January], placards from the ANSWER
coalition, led by the reformist Party for Socialism and Liberation, called to ‘Jail
Killer Cops!’ In your dreams. The capitalist rulers are hardly going to jail their own
police guard dogs. And, even if one cop were charged and imprisoned, it wouldn’t stop
police brutality and terror. The cops serve, together with the military and the prisons,
as the core of a state whose purpose is the repression of the working class and oppressed
by any means necessary.”
—Workers Vanguard, 16 January
It is quite true that jailing Mehserle “wouldn’t stop police brutality and
terror.” But that is no reason not to demand that he spend the rest of his miserable
life behind bars.
Grant’s murder provides a graphic reminder that Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency
has not changed the fact that American “free enterprise” has its roots in
slavery and brutal racial oppression. Marxism teaches that the entire capitalist
“justice” system, from cops to courts to jails, “serves and
protects” a social system predicated on exploitation and inequality. Racism is
inextricably woven into the fabric of American capitalism—it always has been and
always will be. This is why revolutionaries, while opposing all concrete manifestations of
racial oppression, do not promote the illusion that capitalism can somehow be purged of
racism. Our program calls for Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Advocacy of a revolutionary solution to social oppression does not, however, mean that
Marxists are not also prepared to advance certain concrete, usually negative, demands on
bourgeois authority. An obvious example is the call to drop legal proceedings against
those who were arrested on 7 January while protesting this hideous crime. It is equally
necessary to demand, not only that Mehserle’s bail be revoked, but that this racist killer
be jailed for life.
This is not the first time that this issue has come up. The SL raised exactly the same
criticism after New York City police gunned down Amadou Diallo, a young black immigrant,
in February 1999. We responded as follows in a statement on the acquittal of the four
killer cops:
“Of course a murder conviction for these killer cops would not have
ended police brutality nor resurrected Diallo. But whenever a few cops can be held
accountable for a few of their crimes it is a small victory for their victims and a small
setback for the proponents of the racist ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ style of
‘crime-fighting’ pushed by [New York Mayor Rudy] Giuliani and his ilk. Conversely,
the fact that Diallo’s killers were acquitted only encourages further abuses. This month
NYPD hit squads have gunned down another two unarmed black men: Malcolm Ferguson on 1
March and Patrick Dorismond on 16 March.
“Revolutionaries support demands to jail individual cops guilty of murder, while
combating illusions in the possibility of reforming the police. The once-Trotskyist
Spartacist League (SL), which historically took such an approach, has recently changed its
tune:
“‘The main slogan raised by the WWP [Workers World Party] on
February 26 was “Jail the Killer Cops!” while the ISO [International Socialist
Organization] chimed in with the call, “Jail the Racist Thugs in Blue.” This
appeal to the capitalist rulers to chastise their racist killers for doing their job
reflects the view of the ISO/WWP opportunists that the capitalist state can be pressured
to serve the interests of the workers and minorities.’”
—Workers Vanguard, 10 March [2000]
“While the SL stops short of chastising itself for having raised similar demands
in the past, we note that this new ‘leftist’ posturing parallels other recent line
changes, including rejection of both the general strike demand and the united front.
“If calling for jailing killer cops only creates illusions in the capitalist
state, one might imagine that this would also be true of demands for freeing Mumia
Abu-Jamal or abolishing the racist death penalty. Yet Workers Vanguard reprints a
March 1st letter from the SL’s legal arm to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and San
Francisco DA Terence Hallinan raising both of these. Go figure.”
—reprinted in 1917, No.
22, 2000
While the SL leaders did not respond to our criticism, we note that they have not
repudiated either the call to free Mumia Abu-Jamal or the demand for the abolition of the
racist death penalty. It is not clear to us whether the ostentatiously sectarian impulse
evident in opposing the call to jail killer cops—an impulse increasingly, if
inconsistently, exhibited by the Spartacists in relation to a variety of other issues
(see, for example, “Of Presidents &
Principles,” 1917, No. 30, 2008)—is motivated by a desire to
flaunt the “uniquely correct” insights of their peerless leader, James M.
Robertson, or is merely an attempt to give their growing abstentionism a suitably
“programmatic” cover. Whatever the motivation, it is just plain wrong.