By Sam Marcy (May 14, 1992)
The brutal suppression of the Los Angeles insurrection offers a classic example
of the relationship of bourgeois democracy to the capitalist state. The
statistics most eloquently demonstrate the relationship.
The number of arrests in Los Angeles County alone as of May 5 is 12,111 and
still rising. The number of injuries has reached a staggering 2,383. Several
hundred are critically wounded. Thus the number of dead at present--55--will
undoubtedly continue to rise.
All this has to be seen in light of the repressive forces amassed by the city,
state and federal government: 8,000 police, 9,800 National Guard troops, 1,400
Marines, 1,800 Army soldiers and 1,000 federal marshals. (Associated Press, May
5)
At the bottom of it all
Marxism differs from all forms of bourgeois sociology in this most fundamental
way: all bourgeois social sciences are directed at covering up and
concealing--sometimes in the most shameful way--the predatory class character
of present- day capitalist society. Marxism, on the other hand, reveals in the
clearest and sharpest manner not only the antagonisms that continually rend
asunder present-day bourgeois society but also their basis--the ownership of
the means of production by a handful of millionaires and billionaires.
Bourgeois sociology must leave out of consideration the fact that society is
divided into exploiter and exploited, oppressors of nationalities and
oppressed. The basis for both the exploitation and oppression is the ownership
of the means of production by an ever-diminishing group of the population that
controls the vital arteries of contemporary society. They are the bourgeoisie,
the ruling class. At the other end of the axis is the proletariat of all
nationalities, the producer of all the fabulous wealth.
Material wealth has been vastly increasing along with the masses' productivity
of labor. But only 1 percent of the population amasses the lion's share of what
the workers produce while a greater and greater mass is impoverished.
Flattering `the people'
Especially during periods of parliamentary elections as in the U.S. today,
bourgeois sociologists are full of effusive praise for "the people." Each and
every capitalist politician embraces "the people" with what often becomes
disgusting flattery. The people are everything during periods when the
bourgeoisie needs them most of all, as during its many predatory wars. Indeed,
at no time is the bourgeoisie so attached to the people as when it is in
deepest crisis.
But the people--the unarmed masses--become nothing, not even human beings, when
they are in the full throes of rebellion against the bourgeoisie's monstrous
police and military machine. Does not the Los Angeles insurrection prove all
this?
No amount of praise, no amount of flattery can substitute for a clear-cut
delineation of the class divisions that perpetually rend society apart.
To the bourgeois social scientists the masses are the object of history.
Marxist theory, on the other hand, demonstrates that the masses are the subject
of history. Where they are the objects of history they are manipulated as raw
material to suit the aims of ruling class exploitation. They become the subject
of history only when they rise to the surface in mass revolutionary action.
Their rising, as in Los Angeles, is what Karl Marx called the locomotive of
history. Their revolutionary struggle accelerates history, bringing to the fore
the real character of the mass movement.
To speak of the people in general terms, without cutting through the propaganda
to reveal the relations of exploiter to exploited, of oppressor to oppressed,
is to participate in covering up the reality.
Oppression of a whole people
Most indispensable for an understanding of contemporary society is the relation
between oppressor and oppressed nationalities. One cannot apply Marxism to any
meaningful extent without first recognizing the existence of national
oppression--the oppression of a whole people by capitalist imperialism. This is
one of the most characteristic features of the present world reality.
This concept above all others must be kept foremost if we hope to understand
what has happened in Los Angeles and in other major cities of this country.
The insurrection and the way it is being suppressed closely follow the
exposition by Frederick Engels in his book "The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State," and later brought up to date by Lenin in "State and
Revolution."
What is the state? What is democracy?
Bourgeois sociologists and scholars, and above all capitalist politicians,
always confound the relationship between the two. They often treat them as a
single phenomenon. In reality, the relation between democracy and the state is
based on an inner struggle--between form and essence.
The state can take on many different forms. A state can have the form of a
bourgeois democracy; it can be a monarchy; it may be ruled by a military junta.
And in modern society, on the very edge of the 21st century, it may have a
totalitarian or fascist form.
Whatever its form, its essence is determined by which class is dominant
economically and consequently also dominant politically. In contemporary
society, this means the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie over the
proletariat and the oppressed nationalities.
Bourgeoisie needs different forms of rule
The bourgeoisie cannot maintain its class rule by relying solely on one
particular form of the state. It can't rely only on the governing
officialdom--even those at the very summit of the state, even when they are
solely millionaires and billionaires. Under such circumstances, should there be
an imperialist war or a deep capitalist crisis that leads to ferment among the
masses, the bourgeois state would be vulnerable to revolutionary overthrow.
But the state is not just the officialdom--who presume to govern in the
interest of all the people. The state in its essential characteristics is the
organization, to quote Engels, of a "special public force" that consists not
merely of armed men and women but of material appendages, prisons and
repressive institutions of all kinds.
The decisive basic ingredient of the state is the armed forces with all their
material appendages and all who service them. Most noteworthy are the
prisons--more and more of them--calculated to break the spirit of millions of
the most oppressed while pretending to some mock forms of rehabilitation. All
the most modern means--mental and physical--are used to demoralize and deprave
the character of those incarcerated.
These repressive institutions, this public force appears so omnipotent against
the unarmed mass of the oppressed and exploited. But it stands out as the very
epitome of gentility and humaneness when it comes to incarcerating favored
individuals, especially the very rich, who have transgressed the norms of
capitalist law.
In general then, the Los Angeles insurrection shows that democracy is a veil
that hides the repressive character of the capitalist state. The state at all
times is the state of the dominant class. And the objective of the special
bodies of armed men and women is to secure, safeguard and uphold the domination
of the bourgeoisie.
Growth of the state
Engels explained that in the course of development of capitalist society, as
the class antagonisms grow sharper, the state--that is, the public force--grows
stronger.
Said Engels, "We have only to look at our present-day Europe where class
struggle, rivalry and conquest has screwed up the public power to such a pitch
that it threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself."
Written more than 100 years ago, this refers to the growth of militarism. The
sharpening of class and national antagonisms had even then resulted in larger
and larger appropriations for civilian and military personnel employed for the
sole purpose of suppressing the civil population at home and waging adventurist
imperialist wars abroad.
The state grows in proportion as class and national antagonisms develop.
Democracy is merely a form which hides the predatory class character of the
bourgeois state. Nothing so much proves this as the steady and consistent
growth of militarism and the police forces in times of peace as well as war.
The ruling class continually cultivates racism to keep the working class
divided, in order to maintain its domination. This is as true at home as it is
abroad. The forces of racism and national oppression have been deliberately
stimulated by Pentagon and State Department policies all across the globe.
Marxism on violence
After every stage in the struggle of the workers and oppressed people, there
follows an ideological struggle over what methods the masses should embrace to
achieve their liberation from imperialist monopoly capital. There are always
those who abjure violence while minimizing the initial use of violence by the
ruling class. They denounce it in words, while in deeds they really cover it
up. That's precisely what's happening now.
Yes indeed, they readily admit the verdict in the Rodney King beating was
erroneous, unfair. But--and here their voices grow louder--"The masses should
not have taken to the streets and taken matters into their own hands." Their
denunciation of the violence of the ruling class is subdued and muffled-- above
all is it hypocritical, a sheer formality. It's an indecent way of seeming to
take both sides of the argument when what follows is in reality a condemnation
of the masses.
In times when the bourgeoisie is up against the wall, when the masses have
risen suddenly and unexpectedly, the bourgeoisie gets most lyrical in abjuring
violence. It conjures up all sorts of lies and deceits about the unruliness of
a few among the masses as against the orderly, law-abiding many.
Marxism here again cuts through it all. The Marxist view of violence flows from
an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes between the
violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses.
Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from
disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to
show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of
nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.
Indeed, Marxists do prefer nonviolent methods if the objectives the masses
seek--freedom from oppression and exploitation--can be obtained that way. But
Marxism explains the historical evolution of the class struggle as well as the
struggle of oppressed nations as against oppressors.
Revolutions, force and violence
As Marx put it, "force is the midwife to every great revolution." This is what
Marx derived from his study of the class struggle in general and of capitalist
society in particular.
None of the great revolutions has ever occurred without being accompanied by
force and violence. And it is always the oppressor--the ruling class and the
oppressing nationality--that is most congenitally prone to use force as soon as
the masses raise their heads.
In all the bourgeois revolutions in Europe, this new would-be ruling class used
the masses to fight its battles against the feudal lords. Then, when the masses
raised their heads to fight for their own liberation against the bourgeoisie,
they were met with the most fearful and unmitigated violence. All European
history is filled with such examples, from the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 to
the Paris Commune of 1871.
Does not the bourgeoisie, once it has tamed the proletariat at home, use force
and violence through its vast military armada to more efficiently exploit and
suppress the many underdeveloped nations throughout the world?
It is so illuminating that Iraq, the nation subjected to the most violent,
truly genocidal military attack in recent times, has taken upon itself to press
a formal complaint in the UN Security Council on behalf of the embattled masses
in Los Angeles and other cities. Iraq called on that body to condemn and
investigate the nature of the developments here--and the irony is that the head
of the Security Council felt obligated to accept the complaint. Not even the
U.S. delegate, obviously taken by surprise, objected.
How much real difference is there between the suppression of the Paris Commune
in 1871 and that of the revolutionary rising of the masses in Los Angeles in
1992? The brutal suppression differs only in magnitude and not in essence.
While it might seem that in Los Angeles national oppression alone is involved,
in reality it derives from the class exploitation of the African American
masses dating back to the days of slavery.
Watts and social legislation
Following the Watts insurrection, the bourgeoisie made lofty promises to
improve the situation. The Watts, Detroit, Newark and other rebellions in the
1960s did win significant concessions that eventually were enacted into law.
They became the basis for a temporary improvement in the economic and social
situation of the oppressed people.
None of the progressive legislation, up to and including affirmative action,
would have been enacted had it not been for the rebellions during the 1960s and
the 1970s. Yet now, almost three decades after the Watts rebellion, the masses
are in greater poverty and the repression is heavier than before. The fruits of
what was won have withered on the vine as racism and the deterioration of
economic conditions took hold once again.
Once more the bourgeois politicians attempted to mollify the masses with
endless promises of improvements never destined to see the light of day. This
evoked a profound revulsion among the masses. It took only an incident like the
incredible verdict of the rigged jury that freed the four police officers in
the Rodney King beating to ignite a storm of revolutionary protest.
If revolutionary measures are ever to have any validity, doesn't a case like
this justify the people taking destiny into their own hands?
Less workers, more cops
How interesting that technology everywhere displaces labor, reducing the number
of personnel.
There was a time when it was hoped that the mere development of technical and
industrial progress, the increase in mechanization and automation, would
contribute to the well-being of the masses. This has once again shown itself to
be a hollow mockery. The truth is that the development of higher and more
sophisticated technology under capitalism doesn't contribute to the welfare of
the masses but, on the contrary, throws them into greater misery.
What has been the general trend? The growth of technology, particularly
sophisticated high technology, has reduced the number of workers employed in
industry as well as in the services. The introduction of labor-saving devices
and methods has dramatically reduced the number of workers in all fields.
But the opposite trend prevails in the police forces. This is an absolutely
incontestable fact.
At one time the police patrolled the streets on foot. Maybe they used a public
telephone for communications with headquarters. Today they are equipped with
sophisticated gear. They ride either on motorcycles or in police cars or
helicopters. They communicate by radio.
All this should reduce the number of police. But the trend is quite the
contrary: to increase the forces of repression. This is not geared to
productivity as in industry. Their growth is geared to the growth of national
antagonisms, the growth of racism, and the bourgeoisie's general anti-labor
offensive.
In Los Angeles, the bourgeoisie is forced to bring in federal troops to assist
city and state authorities. The social composition of the Army is not just a
cross-section of capitalist society. The Army and Marines, especially the
infantry, have a preponderance of Black and Latino soldiers. What does this
signify?
The U.S. imperialists had to wage a technological war against Iraq out of fear
that the preponderance of Black and Latino soldiers could end up in a
disastrous rebellion; they might refuse to engage in a war against their
sisters and brothers in the interests of the class enemy. That's why the armed
forces never really got into the ground war that seemed at first to be in the
offing.
In Los Angeles the local police and state forces were inadequate. Only because
the masses were unarmed was the bourgeoisie able to suppress what was in truth
an insurrection--a revolutionary uprising.
Spontaneity and consciousness
As Marx would put it, such a rising is a festival of the masses. The incidental
harm is far outweighed by the fact that it raises the level of the struggle to
a higher plateau. The wounds inflicted by the gendarmerie will be healed. The
lessons will be learned: that a spontaneous uprising has to be supported with
whatever means are available; that a great divide exists between the leaders
and the masses.
No viable class or nation in modern capitalist society can hope to take destiny
in its own hands by spontaneous struggles alone. Spontaneity as an element of
social struggle must beget its own opposite: leadership and organization.
Consciousness of this will inevitably grow.
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