Capitalism, the working class and the fight against police violence

Click here to access article by David Walsh from World Socialist Web Site.

...the fundamental division in Baltimore—as in American society as a whole—is class, not race. Like many urban centers, Baltimore is run by a predominantly black political elite, including the mayor, the city council president, the police chief, the top prosecutor and many others. Half of the police force is black as well.

Our ruling masters like to divide Americans on racial lines, however this is only to obscure the class lines and class war waged by the ruling capitalists along with their middle-class servants, against the rest of the population. But then in the 1950s and '60s the Civil Rights Movement happened to ameliorate the worst forms of racism, and it wasn't fashionable anymore to be a racist. So, then our masters came up with another deception to hide their racist divide and rule operation. They trained, rewarded, and generally co-opted a small layer of African-Americans like Obama who were willing to sell their souls to the master-owners of society much like they did with African slave traders who sold their fellow Africans into Anglo-American slavery.

To facilitate the war on the working class, the ruling class worked deliberately to integrate a small minority of the African-American middle class into the mechanisms of state power, including through policies such as affirmative action. Meanwhile, conditions for the vast majority of African-American workers and youth are worse today than they were in the 1960s.

Obama himself represents the culmination of this process.

This reminds me of the saying often attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The current way which our masters use this thin layer of African-Americans is much like what existed in the early days of slavery in our country. Malcolm X gave a very vivid description of this history.

There was two kind of slaves. There was the house negro and the field negro. The house negro, they lived in the house, with master. They dressed pretty good. They ate good, cause they ate his food, what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near their master, and they loved their master, more than their master loved himself.

The point is: all Americans in the shrinking middle class are essentially "house niggers", but African-Americans suffer racism most dramatically at the hands of police; but milder, hidden forms of racism are still prevalent throughout all institutions which adversely impact the economic opportunities for African-Americans the most.