Re: [Marxism] SF protests cop killing of unarmed man

[Shacht@xxxxxxx]

This comment is in respose to assorted recent postings about the Oscar  Grank 
killing in Oakland, California.
Three issues raise themselves in this context: The killing, the "riot" and  
some of the responses on Marxmail.
 
The killing. The incident itself can be viewed on You Tube and other  places, 
and I thank Todd Chretien for the reference to "indybay.org" as one of  them. 
The immediate reaction of the left was that this was a racist killing, as  it 
was. But the question is what made it a racist killing? The fact that Grant  
was black - not that the cop was white. So I take issue with Chretien for the  
adjective placed prominently before the word "cop" in his posting. Prominent  
because it was the first use of the word cop and the adjective was already 
there  as though the initiating cause of the cop shooting Grant were that the 
cop  was white as opposed to the fact that the shooter was a  cop. We have to 
be 
clear about this.
 
Grant was young, black, a convicted felon released from prison about  six 
months before, a father of a young child and gainfully employed. It was  in the 
early morning hours, he was on a BART train, presumably en route home  with a 
group of other African American men. A fight or scuffle of some sort  broke 
out. The police were called and the train stopped. The incident occurred,  I 
think, at the Fruitvale Station - located in a neighborhood with a large black  
population. 
 
The police who respond are not the Oakland Police. They are BART Police -  
employees of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District. A considerable proportion of  
the employees of BART - train operators, station attendants and bureaucrats 
are  African American. Some would say that African American employment within 
BART  seems disproportional to the African American percentage of the 
population. But  this is not true within the Bay Area or Alameda County, in 
which most 
of the  cities served by BART are located. In other words,  BART, as such, is 
not a racist institution. But BART,  operating as an independent governmental 
agency is clothed with what  governmental types like to call the police power 
and to this end has  its own body of armed men.
 
What do BART cops - or, for that matter, any cops - do? They are (using a  
color analogy, God forbid!) the white blood corpuscles of capitalism. They are  
there to attack any body found within the capitalist political economy that 
pose  a threat to its orderly operation. On the outskirts of day to day 
capitalism  cops on entities such as BART throw drunks off trains, homeless out 
of 
stations  at closing hours, prevent or respond to skirmishes on BART trains (as 
happened  here) or respond to various kinds of what the state calls "criminal 
activity."  Like police forces everywhere they are forced to deal with the 
"criminal  element," the social misfits, social outcasts, lumpen or just crazed 
outcasts of  society. (And like every police force they become, over time, as 
brutalized as  the people with whom they deal already are at the hands of 
society - but that is  not really pertinent here).
 
In short the police forces exist to ensure that capitalism is not harmed  nor 
interfered with by the very ones it makes its victims - the economically  
oppressed, socially dispossessed, chonically mentally ill excluded from 
adequate  
mental health care (as has been the case for decades in California since 
Reagan  assaulted the state hospitals when governor), minorities ripped apart 
by  
society's pliers, victims of racism, chronically 
unemployed, homeless. And also against those who demonstrate to change this  
order or whose actions seem or are a threat to that order or actually rebel or 
 revolt in riots against it in despair or anger. That is their role. 
Occasionally  they arrest an embezzler because the nature of capital is such 
that 
capitalists  can't act in their own interests as a class, they have to have the 
state do it  for them. And if it didn't, there would be social unrest within 
the 
capitalist  class and every class against grafters that would become 
impossible to stem.  That's what cops do. 
 
Mehserle (I think that was his name) was in the Fruitvale BART Station with  
a gun (as well as a Taser gun the BART police were ill-trained to use) not  
because he was white - but because he was a  cop.  He emerged out of his 
mother's womb without having heard of "race." He may well  have become imbued 
with 
racist sentiment afterward, not least in going through a  police academy 
(although one has to wonder about people who go through the  police academy to 
begin 
with). And he may have had genuinely racist attitudes.  But he wasn't in that 
BART Station, with that uniform, carrying that gun because  he was white.
 
Chretien's choice of the "white" adjective reflects a crude social liberal  
response. It carries with it the assumption that racism is a disease that 
whites  naturally have. Sort of like the "German gene" that Stalinists were so 
fond 
of  referencing in the immediate post war years especially in Britain to 
justify  Russian conduct in East Germany and the "need" to keep Germany divided 
so 
 Germans would not "break out again." (I'm thinking of Connie Zilliacus,  
Conforth, Palm-Dutt or such but cannot be sure it was one of them). To be sure, 
 
once its on its way racism - even within individuals - does have its own  
dialectic, but it has to get "on its way" first.
 
A revolutionary socialist is ill-advised to make the racial aspect the  first 
part of an analysis. Especially a revolutionary socialist whose  antecedents 
harkens back to a tradition of Trotskyism devoted to re-thinking  hoary 
slogans and approaches not only to the Russian but to the national  question. 
 
A few years ago, four Oakland cops were charged with being "the Riders" -so  
called "rogue" cops who rode  in a van around Oakland at night planting  
evidence of black men, brutalizing them and framing them. And they did. And 
were  
turned in by a white Oakland cop who refused to go along with it. And  
prosecuted. And when the first trial came back with a hung jury, NPR announced  
the 
following morning that an Oakland jury had acquitted "three white cops" of  
brutality against blacks.
 
Of course, there was one white cop and two minority cops: an Asian and an  
Ease Indian. This was neither NPR's nor its informant's concern. Moreover, 
there 
 had not been an acquittal. There was a hung jury on most charges. The left  
lawyers and social liberals denounced the verdict. Speculation was indulged 
that  the DA had messed the case up. The jury was biased - there were 
minorities 
but  no blacks. One of the six jurors who voted not guilty was a UC professor 
and  member of the ACLU, which didn't stop their members from blasting the 
jury  system anyway. White jurors it was inferred could not understand black 
testimony  - that was the implication of the argument. The flip side, more 
clearly  articulated, was that white jurors could not properly sit in judgment 
of 
... not  defendants but of white testimony. Minoritiy jurors could. After 
holding a press  conference with jurors who voted guilty, the left dropped its 
volume for a  while. Then came the second trial. Now the DA was supposed to be 
ready. He  charged fewer criminal acts to ensure that those on which the most 
evidence was  available were pursued and weaker ones not. In addition, charges 
pursued would  not require the testimonty of convicted felons as they had in 
the 
first case.  And racism was to be promoted more as the motive behind the cops 
actions.
 
This jury came back quicker, acquitting all cops on some charges, and one  
cop - the white cop - of all charges. but then all they had him on was a  
misdemeanor anyway of altering a police report at the order of a superior. The  
white cop left the courtroom with his wife, an African Amereican police  
lieutenant. The City of Oakland then paid roughly $1,000,000.00 to him to avoid 
 a 
defamation suit.
 
And there was a fourth cop - not tried. This was the ringleader of the  group 
charged with the worst crimes of kidnapping and assault as well as  planting 
evidence. He was an Hispanic who fled to Mexico. But the public  perception 
was that white cops had brutalized black men and been let off.
 
This sort of trash pumps poison into the body politic, perverts the vision  
of the left and misinforms political instinct, operating again as a mask for 
the  class rule and class relationships that plague society. Such a version of  
reality completely eliminates the economic reality behind oppression and 
racism,  strips it of historical context and renders combatting it or 
comprehending 
it an  impossibility.
 
The riot. Engels was miffed when Hyndman and Bax, would be leaders of the  
"Marxist" left in 1890's England held a public meeting and harrangued a crowd  
that later left the square with them and...looted the local merchants. Why,  
Engels asked, did it not assault 10 Downing Street? That Hyndman and Bax -  
middle class intellectuals - should find it impossible to tell the lumpen  
proletariat from the working class should not be surprising. In Oakland a part  
of 
the demonstrators broke off from the main group and looted petty bourgeois  
minority owned businesses. These things happen in a lot of demonstrations and 
ar  
not unusual, nor should the left be appoplectic about them. Or apologetic.  
Revolution and even symbols of revolt are "carnivals of the oppressed" on  
occasion. So the picque of one the respondents on Marxmail the other day seems  
to 
me all out of proportion.
 
The responses on Marxmail. Denunciations of racism - which from  
intellectuals seem like a lot of chest-thumping - may get mental endorphins  
pumping, but 
is hardly a substitute for analysis. Nor do condolences to battered  petite 
bourgeois business owners substitute for consideration of programs of  action. 
It reminds me of Joesph Hanson's note to Jack Kennedy's widow, which I  
certainly wouldn't sign even if Life Magazine had run a photograph of Lee 
Harvey  
Oswald holding the Militant in one hand and a rifle in the other - which it 
did.  
We don't look to curry public opinion or shelter under it. Our goal is to 
change  it.
Lenin once chided Maxim Gorky, who sat in Petrograd bewailing the excesses  
of the red terror, with surrounding himself so much with intellectuals that he  
could no longer observe necessity. I would hope that doesn't happen with this 
 group of dedicated but, I suspect, isolated Marxists.
 
 
 
 
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