By Joe O’Cealligh

February 2, 2020

CHICAGO – Friday, February 28th, during the rush hour commute, pigs shot an unarmed man multiple times at the Grand red line station. According to reports, the man was moving between train cars when pigs pursued him. They then attempted to arrest him off the platform.

Captured on video was the struggle that insued. Pigs are seen tazing the man multiple times, attempting to pin the man down, and pepper spraying him in the face. After the pigs failed to detain him, one of the officers can be heard turning to his partner and telling her to “shoot him”. The pig points the gun at the man and tells him: “Put your f*cking hands down.” The man was getting up and wiping his face from the pepper spray when he was shot point blank by the pig.

The man began to run, as any sane person would do after being shot. Pigs followed him and shot him twice more. The man was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in critical condition. The shooting occurred on the same day as former Pig-attorney Mayor Lori Lightfoot touted to the public about the city’s new “safety plan” for the CTA, which significantly increases police presence on CTA buses and trains.

Chairman Mao writes, “Every Communist must grasp the truth; ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'”

When the pigs shoot and kill our class siblings, colonized and oppressed people here in the settler colonial metropole and abroad, it is always a political action. It is the reassertion of the ruling clique’s dictatorship over the People, a warning from the power structure that if one steps out of line they will be met with violent fury. The philosopher Frantz Fanon spoke on this relationship between the state and the People within the colonial context:

“The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression… the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.”

–Wretched of the Earth

Ideologically, some sections of the working class buy into the ruling clique’s narrative, going out of their way to defend the pigs, as if the violation of a minor offense merits being shot. The act of violence asserts the ruling classes power both physically and ideologically: fall in line, do as we say, do not resist.

While pig violence can consolidate it’s ideological hegemony, it at the same time exposes further contradictions. Many liberals see the solution to police violence as a matter of diversity, that the solution being more colonized people assimilated into the forces of reaction. The pig that pulled the trigger happened to be a New Afrikan woman, a neocolonial puppet of the white-supremacist power structure.

A pig, is a pig, is a pig, no matter which way you want to twist it. No matter how many reforms are pushed from within the system, the contradiction will still remain: pigs protect the interests of property through terror tactics and social control. This contradiction will only be resolved through Revolution, the taking back our communities and transportation systems by organized revolutionary violence against the system of capitalism-imperialism. This will take a movement to fight back, one organized and guided by a revolutionary Communist party using as it’s guide Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory. One which understands the contradictions of the capitalist system, the protracted nature of the revolutionary struggle, and is dedicated to the cause of proletarian and national liberation.

All pigs are paper tigers! They can be beaten back and thrown away! Fight back with Revolution!