FTP-Twin Cities

MINNEAPOLIS- Monday evening, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered in South Minneapolis by a white pig from the Minneapolis Police Department. The white pig kneeled on Floyd’s neck as Floyd (as well as many bystanders) pleaded for the officer to remove his knee from his neck, all the while the pig’s partners stood by, doing nothing to stop the murder. The officer remained in this position for almost eight minutes after Floyd lost consciousness, with the reasonable assumption that he knew he was 1) restricting Floyd’s breathing to the point of causing him to lose a consciousness and 2) was continuing to restrict his breathing after the point of losing consciousness, with the obvious implication of death at a certain point beyond that. This pig knowingly murdered George Floyd, and even appeared to derive some sense of pleasure from this foul deed. The pig has been identified as Derek Michael Chauvin, Badge #1087, resident at 7517 17th Street N, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The murder shows many disturbing similarities to the murder of Eric Garner by NYPD pigs in 2014, both in the manner of death, with desperate declarations of “I can’t breathe” uttered repeatedly to no avail as they are being choked by police, but also in the relative triviality of the “offense” that precipitated the encounters – while Eric Garner was extrajudicially executed for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, Floyd suffered the same for either allegedly writing a bad check or using an allegedly counterfeit bill (the situation is still ongoing and reports are still varying) – “forgery in progress” was the call to the scene.  He was, quite literally, murdered for being a Black man who was assumed to be writing a bad check – he was of course at this point nominally innocent until proven guilty, be we know the reality is very, very different from the surface veneer. In essence, Mr. Floyd was murdered for being Black.

Predictably, liberal state and local government has responded with the usual feigned concern and empty and unspecified calls for “accountability” with no clear articulation of what that even means, because they have no intention of actually following through on it. Black people simply do not have the right to life, liberty, or happiness under the present order of things. Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis commented “this man’s life matters”.  “He should not have died, he was a human being and his life mattered. . . . Whatever the investigation reveals, it does not change the single truth that he should be with us this morning. Being Black in America should not be a death sentence,” Frey said. “When you hear someone calling for help, you are supposed to help, and this officer failed in the most basic human sense.”  If he sincerely believes in any of this, why does he do nothing of significance with his power to actually change the conditions at the root of police violence against Black people in this city?  Betsy Hodges spouted similar platitudes and made promises in regards to reforming officer conduct with bias training in regards to Jamar Clark’s case, yet what has concretely changed since then?  Nothing, and now we’re seeing the results of this ineptitude and willful negligence, yet again. So why should we take anything Frey says seriously?  The thing that really puts the lie to his platitudes is that Frey recently *increased the budget* of the same police department that killed this person he is shedding crocodile tears for. Once again, we see the mask removed from so-called “progressive leadership”. More funding for this same exact sort of police violence. It is impossible to expect someone willing to do such a drastic opposite from what they promise to be of any use whatsoever in solving the problems that plague the MPD and which will guarantee that this nightmare recurs over and over.

Similarly, Senator (and front runner for the Democratic vice presidential nominee position) Amy Klobuchar feigned sadness and concern, saying “justice must be served for this man and his family, justice must be served for our community, and justice must be served for our country. We heard his repeated calls for help. We heard him say over and over again that he could not breathe,” Klobuchar said. “And now we have seen yet another horrifying and gut-wrenching instance of an African American man dying.”  This is especially despicable considering her refusal to prosecute the police in similar cases of police killings during her own time as a Hennepin County District Attorney.  Her comments are nothing but purely empty, performative platitudes. Her recent ascent to one of the top options for Democratic Vice President nomination actually underscores the deep, fundamental hypocrisy that rots to the core of the bourgeois state.  If someone like her is being nominated to serve in the second highest executive office in this country, by the Party that claims to represent Black people (as underscored by Joe Biden’s ridiculously chauvinistic claims as of late regarding the lack of Blackness of Black people who don’t vote for him) no less, what does that mean regarding the integrity of the whole system and the bourgeois politicians within it?

This is what we mean when we discuss how reform within the current system is impossible – these are the hypocrites we are tasked with working with in the process of reform. Any reforms that will be ceded under this context will merely be the most unsatisfactory of scraps from the table of what’s truly possible, because these people are, out of their own interests, only willing to cede the absolute minimum amount that will be need to keep their heads from metaphorically, (preferably literally), rolling. Especially in the case of the violence of settler-colonial pigs against nationally oppressed people, such as Black people and Chicanos, when we’re talking people’s lives, we can’t afford to fight for crumbs. We can’t fight for “nicer” pigs who get vague and non-consequential “implicit bias training” that they can then immediately ignore and move on from and continue to do shit like this. Minneapolis PD has since fired the officers in question but that is not even remotely sufficient – all involved officers need to be brought up on murder charges and convicted at bare minimum for anything resembling justice to be served here.  They are showing their refusal to seriously address the matter in the fact that as we type this, police in riot gear are deploying chemical weapons to disperse our comrades who, alongside the masses are collecting in the streets and seeking justice for George Floyd, surely using material purchased with money from Mayor Frey’s funding increase, that he assures will in part go towards preventing incidents like this. We witnessed a comrade get shot in the head with a rubber bullet on livestream. The contradictions there are self-evident.  How can any of these opportunist politicians make their promises with a straight face when the next night they’re letting the police run amok against the people who they’re nominally making these promises to?  We can’t trust these snakes to carry out justice, and it is this very fact that is driving the masses to the streets in rage as we speak. The primary task now is working to transform the just anger and spontaneous rebellion of the people into coordinated, organized, and sustained conflict with class enemies to forge a revolutionary movement capable of ending the violence of reactionary pigs once and for all.

The revolutionary masses did not sit idly by as tear gas, paint markers and rubber bullets were deployed. Oppression breeds resistance, reactionary violence breeds revolutionary violence, and our hearts swelled as we saw the people seize the streets and exchange blow for blow with the enemy. Tear gas was fired, it was hurled back. Police cars were destroyed, and the precinct was put under siege. No SWAT unit, no chemical weapon, nothing and nobody can hold back the masses in revolt. However, we are not deluded – riots and uprisings have taken place before, but there are always opportunist elements who seek to channel this rage back into legalism and reformism. Enough. We are on the side of those who say “fuck it, let’s go”, but we realize that it must go further. There must be a people’s army, a weapon that can neither be destroyed by repression or coopted, and a Communist Party, a nerve center for all forms of proletarian revolutionary struggle. This Party must be firmly anti-American, anti-Police, and anti-Imperialist. Most importantly, it must be anti-revisionist, as revisionism is what has rotted and destroyed Parties in the past. Without the Party, there can be no revolution. It is not a party of the whole people, it is a Party of the most advanced revolutionary masses who have been steeled through struggle and combat, such as what we saw tonight, into Marxist-Leninist-Maoist cadre capable of unfolding ever more mass movements and training more and more Communists, immune to being bought or coopted, responsible to the Party and the toiling masses alone.

The masses of people of Minneapolis and the United States, principally the colonized proletariat and semi-proletariat, have reached a breaking point. Enough is simply enough. It is the goal of the MCP and affiliated intermediate organizations to stand side by side with the masses as we have in Indianapolis, Saint Louis, and other cities where there have been rebellions to not just participate, but guide and lead through struggle. Enough with BLM opportunists and bourgeois lawyers and compradors. The people must take control, cast out the opportunist elements that profit from our comrades’ deaths, and Communists must consistently hold the red line which holds that it is right to rebel against reactionaries. Our people’s mutual aid programs are political work that are intended to expose the insufficiencies of capitalism, and demonstrate that the masses themselves are capable of securing their own needs, but this is not enough under capitalism-imperialism. We must connect all struggles, the struggle against the Police, the struggle for housing, the struggle for rent and utilities cancellation, the struggle against mass incarceration, and the struggle against Yankee imperialism overseas, and use Marxism Leninism-Maoism as a weapon to transform the old world into the new through disciplined, coordinated, organized, and merciless revolutionary violence. Our enemies must sleep in fear every night of the righteous armed masses, led by their Party, who will enact people’s justice. Everytime we see a comrade die, the city must burn, and burn until the masses of workers rule. Communism is the solution to what we face, and we aim to struggle for it unto death or victory.

FUCK THE MINNEAPOLIS POLICE DEPARTMENT!  IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL!  PEOPLE’S JUSTICE FOR GEORGE FLOYD!