February 2001 

The following leaflet was issued by the Internationalist Group on February 21 in New York City.

A “March for Workers’ Rights” was held in Brooklyn on February 18, called by the Organizing Committee for Workers Rights (OCWR). Announcements for the protest denounced, among other things, “the exploitation, racial discrimination, police harassment and arrests which day laborers in Williamsburg are forced to suffer just for standing on the corner waiting to be hired for a job.” 

However, when the march reached the headquarters of the Latin American Workers Project (which is part of the OCWR, together with the Garment Workers Solidarity Center, New York Workers Committee, Make the Road by Walking and other groups), it was announced from the platform that the event had the “support” of the Latino Officers Association, represented by a City Council candidate who turns out to be a Street Narcotics Enforcement sergeant of the New York Police Department (NYPD).

In response, the Internationalist Group contingent chanted: “No cops – cops out!” Denouncing the fact that joining with police is a betrayal against the exploited and a trap, we angrily left the rally, while the spokesman for the Latin American Workers Project furiously defended linking up with the “good” cops who supposedly exist in “the community,” and phrases about “unity” were pronounced from the podium. The very presence of this criminal repressive force, which murdered Amadou Diallo, was a threat against the workers and immigrants present at this event. What’s next, inviting agents of the migra (immigration police)?

The Internationalist Group figured heavily in local press coverage of the immigrants’ rights march. Newsday (19 February) published photos of our signs and banner with the slogans “Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!” Hoy (19 February), one of the main Spanish-language papers in New York, reported our walkout from the rally over the announced “support” of the Latino Officers Association. The article quoted IG militants saying, “The cops are enemies of the immigrants.”

Today, February 21, the OCWR has called a meeting to discuss plans for May Day. Yet around the world, May Day commemorates the Martyrs of Chicago, hanged for organizing the mass workers meeting of 4 May 1886, which was brutally repressed by the police, who killed several workers and wounded 200. The rally was held to protest the cops’ massacre of workers at the McCormick’s plant two days earlier amidst the wave of strikes and demonstrations demanding the eight-hour day. The leaflet for the mass meeting stressed: “The masters sent out their bloodhounds – the police; they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s,” and it called on the workers to resist the repressive onslaught. The unmistakable lesson of May Day is the need for international revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist class, its politicians and its cops.

“Unity” with police means trampling the memory of Anthony Báez, Patrick Dorismond, Yong Xin Huang, Gideon Busch and countless other victims of the NYPD’s racist terror. Uniting with these professionals of racist, anti-working-class repression is 100 percent counterposed to the defense of the most basic interests of the working class. The cops are the armed fist of the bourgeoisie, the exploiting class that uses its uniformed thugs to repress, jail, beat and kill workers, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, to break strikes and deport immigrants. The police, together with the armed forces, the courts and prisons, embody the capitalist state – the “special bodies of armed men” which in Friedrich Engels’ famous definition exist to defend the property and power of the ruling class, repressing us, the workers and oppressed. Repression is not a matter of a few “bad” cops: it is the function and daily job of the police as such. 

Today, one of the central slogans for this repression is precisely the “war on drugs,” which is the pretext for police occupation of the ghettos and barrios, the imprisonment and deprivation of rights of millions of black and Latin youth, as well as the imperialist aggression of Plan Colombia and U.S. intervention throughout Latin America. In Ecuador – where the U.S. military base at Manta is a key part of Plan Colombia – the reformist leaders led Indians and workers into the trap of an “alliance” with a sector of the armed forces. This led directly to the installation of the current Made in U.S.A. government of Gustavo Noboa, which imposes starvation and dollarization while its repressive forces just killed three indigenous demonstrators and wounded many more in the recent protests. The claim that there are “good” repressors is a straight-out expression of class collaboration and reformist faith in the capitalist state, which lead to the worst defeats for the working people.

In Mexico, police repression is meted out daily by all the bourgeois governments, from the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) which ruled the country for seven decades to the PAN (National Action Party) of the new president, Vicente Fox, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), which governs the Federal District (Mexico City). A year ago, the PRI governor of the state of Hidalgo, seeking to imitate the police invasion which had just broken the student strike at the National University (UNAM), ordered the arrest of 900 students and the storming of the Rural Teachers Training Institute of El Mexe. But the population rose up in a courageous rebellion, capturing dozens of the uniformed repressors, disarming them and holding them until they were able to exchange them for the arrested students (The Internationalist No. 8, June 2000).

In the United States since the ’60s, black and Latino nationalists, together with many bourgeois Democratic Party politicians, have claimed that things are different when the one wearing the blue uniform is black or Hispanic. Not so. Aníbal Carrasquillo Jr., the youth murdered by officer Marco Calderón in Brooklyn in January 1995; Librado Sánchez, the cook murdered by officer Richard Soto in February 1997 while he was working at the El Caribe restaurant in Queens – these are just two of the innumerable examples which give the lie to this claim. In Los Angeles, the Latin anti-drug cops of the Ramparts Division became notorious for leaving a Hispanic youth paralyzed in the course of their reign of terror in the barrios. Meanwhile, the new head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes, formerly a high-ranking Border Patrol officer and creator of the racist Operation Hold the Line against “illegal” immigrants.

Protest against the racist verdict exonerating the police who murdered Amadou Diallo, February 2000.

In the government’s dirty war of extermination against leaders and activists of the Black Panther Party in the ’60s, one of the most notorious cases was the cold-blooded murder of 16-year-old Fred Hampton in Chicago, carried out by a shotgun-wielding black cop. Today, there are many Latins and blacks among the jailers who keep millions of black and Hispanic youth in captivity – together with class-war prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical black journalist on Pennsylvania’s death row, and Native American activist Leonard Peltier. As Mumia pointed out when our Brazilian comrades faced state repression in their campaign to expel cops from the municipal workers union in the city of Volta Redonda: “Throughout history, police have protected the status quo”; they are “agents of the wealthy and propertied classes” (“Police: Part of, or Enemies of, Labor?” 31 March 1996). From Brazil to the U.S., we fight to throw cops of all kinds out of every workers organization. The Internationalist Group calls on those who protest exploitation and racist discrimination to adamantly demand: Cops out!

To defeat the migra and the bosses, what is urgently needed is the class-struggle mobilization of the proletariat at the head of all the oppressed. This requires a fight against the entire capitalist system of cop terror, exploitation, racism and war – a fight for socialist revolution. It requires building a multiracial, revolutionary and internationalist workers party, forged in struggle against every form of class collaboration, against every “alliance” with the exploiters and their agents of repression.

Internationalist Group/League for the Fourth International 
21 February 2001