Senseless murder and other anti-social violence are a byproduct of a system based on the brutal exploitation of the toiling majority by the capitalist ruling families and the dog-eat-dog values it breeds. Saying this is not to excuse the inhuman rampage of Ramos, and others who have laid waste to innocent lives. It is where we have to start in charting a working-class course to deal with this reality.
All class societies based on private property have depended on oppression and state-organized violence to maintain the rule of the exploiting minority.
Capitalist rulers are different only in so far as they take that violence to savage new heights with their imperialist wars of the last century, their stockpiling of an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the brutal violence they unleashed against colonial peoples fighting for their independence.
At home, the daily brutality of their drive to profit off our backs and their criminal “justice” system with its prisons and death penalty, all breed a system of “look out for number one” and violence.
Despite workers’ hard-fought efforts to unite, to form unions and fight for gains for all, the capitalist class continues to drive production with complete disregard for workers’ lives and limbs. Every year more than 5,000 workers are killed on the job in the U.S. Many more die from work-related diseases. Other workers are sentenced to death by the capitalist rulers’ for-profit “health care” system and nursing homes.
Working class is bearer of solidarity
But the working class can overthrow capitalism and its inherent brutality. Since capitalism emerged, the working class has grown massively, and, since the Second World War has become a majority in every corner of the world. Along with it have grown habits of mutual trust, working-class solidarity and opposition to racism and other forms of prejudice that workers learn through our common struggles. When we join together to defend ourselves we begin to recognize our self-worth and collective capacities.
During mass struggles, violent crime within the working class begins to diminish. That was true during the Black-led working-class movement that uprooted Jim Crow segregation, as millions discovered they had something worth uniting and fighting for. That victorious struggle was made possible by our determination to stand up to the state power of the capitalist class. It involved both the power of our numbers and, when necessary, disciplined armed self-defense against state-sanctioned violence and the terror from those trying to uphold racial segregation.
In the course of coming class struggles, workers and farmers will face violent assaults from the cops and fascist thugs that the rulers unleash to try to crush our efforts to fight for the jobs, wages, conditions and rights we need.
Ultimately it will take a fight to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers to end the violence inherent in their system. That’s what workers and farmers in Cuba showed can be done.
Through a revolutionary war led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, working people took power, and did so with as little bloodshed as possible. They refused to mistreat or demean regime troops they captured. Their victory and the course charted by their communist leadership laid the foundations for workers and farmers to take the factories, land and banks from U.S. companies and native capitalists alike and for millions to begin transforming their conditions and themselves....
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