Tyre Nichols died on January 10, 2023, after three days spent in critical condition following his brutal beating at the hands of the Memphis Police Department. One view on Nichols’ murder among well-meaning liberals is that it is an outrageous event, that it represents a failure of policing, and that it will be the instigating incident for a wave of protest that may reshape U.S. society. This view is deeply flawed: If the murder of Tyre Nichols by the police is such an event, then so were the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and thousands of other Black people; so was the beating of Rodney King. We need to take a longer view. Such murders are not events of shocking dysfunction; they are the police carrying out their intended function.
It is worthwhile to look at the liberal political and media response to this murder, which has emphasized shock and horror, and has called for massive but non-confrontational “protest” assemblies. These commentators are not looking to create the conditions for lasting or fundamental change, and their calls do not signify a shift towards anti-racism in our government. The goal of these propagandists, from government officials to media talking-heads, is to assuage mass outrage in the wake of yet another act of police terror; their goal is to render “protest” harmless. With this behavior, these ideological institutions are also carrying out their function; in this case protecting their more repressive brethren.
Claude Levi-Strauss, a founder of structural anthropology, once observed: “To say that society functions is a truism; but to say that everything, in a society, functions is absurd.” The society we are looking at, the U.S., is capitalist: It is directed entirely by a dictatorship of the bourgeois class. This function is maintained and reproduced by the capitalist state, through many specific apparatuses. These can be ideological institutions, concerned with reproducing the various social relations that form capitalist society: those concerned with legislature and legality; with education, training, and certification; with reproduction of workers and family; with creation, distribution and censorship of media; with disability, eugenics, and the management of the surplus worker army; and many more. Or they can be repressive arms like the police, prisons, border security, or others which act directly to suppress any struggle against the ruling capitalist class, and carry out direct population management. It is obvious to most how the police fight against the interests and cause of workers, of Black people, of Indigenous people, of women, of LGBTQ people. What is perhaps less obvious is how this repression is supported at the ideological level.
The primary approach of liberal media to repression by police and other state arms is simply silence. Most abuse, by police or otherwise, is routine, and where possible bourgeois propagandists simply do not highlight it. When this approach fails and the crimes of the state’s repressive arms threaten to break through this wall of silence, the ruling class throws the gears in reverse. The portrayal then is as an event of shocking dysfunction that all Americans must unite in outrage over, about which there must be tragic soul searching. This accomplishes several goals: it obscures the systematic nature of the repression from being focussed on, it pushes an imagined “national unity” (disregarding the fact that there is no “American nation”) in front of a real class dictatorship, and it promotes individual moral reflection over collective direct resolution. President Biden’s statement on the murder of Tyre Nichols is a very recent, very clear example of the government’s role in ideological production — that is, in the crafting and control of the socially-accepted narrative surrounding these events. Biden described the murder as an exceptional tragedy and situates it within an abstract “pain” and “trauma” experienced by Black people in the U.S., rather than a concrete system of racial repression. Biden’s most definite, actionable declaration is to “join Mr. Nichols’ family in calling for peaceful protest.”
Suppose we take Biden’s framing for granted, and believe that the murder of Tyre Nichols was an isolated, exceptionally tragic event, a moment of terrible dysfunction in an otherwise “functional” police system, and suppose we take for granted Biden’s appeal for “peaceful protest” in reaction to this momentary tragedy. The resulting picture is incoherent. How can the chief executive of the state call for peaceful protest against the action of that same state? How would any protest compel him to act, that the weight of tragedy didn’t already? If, however, we view this statement as one part of capitalist society (the office of the President of the U.S.) functioning to maintain another part (Black oppression, expropriation, and murder), then things are totally clear. The work of the statement is to push for the exceptionalization of this routine anti-Black violence, to create assemblies for “protest” that instead merely mark the event and then dissolve again. What is the capitalist state advocating? Nothing more than protests that act as a pressure valve! In other words, Biden says, “Burn off some anger, release some steam, but don’t let it threaten anything important — like our property.”
This analysis is nothing new. The British-Indian Marxist-Leninist and Communist Party leader Rajani Palme Dutt wrote similarly in 1923 about the error of highlighting individual atrocities and so casting into shadow the routine basis of imperial violence:
The real basis of the [British] Empire is not the artificial cult of Empire Days, Kipling, the King-Emperor, &c., but a severely material basis woven into the lives of everyone and holding them by ties not always seen.
As a result our counter-propaganda has commonly missed the mark. It has made the mistake of fighting the Empire as an idea, by attacking or ridiculing “Empire-mongers” or “imperialism,” or occasionally arousing sentiment over especially atrocious samples of British rule.
The result is no real opposition to the Empire, but only a sentimental tradition of opposition, which is not really understood and is therefore never translated into anything positive and is rapidly discarded as old-fashioned prejudice by Labour politicians when they rise to be taken in by the governing class.
The practice of peaceful liberal protest in the U.S., as encouraged and specifically called upon by all levels of state propaganda, is just such a sentimental tradition. Many of those who participate oppose the cult of empire, and in doing so are sometimes described or self-identified as anti-imperialist. But they remain short of positive action, and frequently fail to even understand the material basis of imperialism beyond its cult. Indeed much of this liberal ‘anti-imperialism’ is committed to a social-democratic welfare state funded by taxation of capital, and so ultimately endorse exploitation by the empire they claim to oppose.
We must always ask, however, what is the solution that you propose? We will quickly see the bankruptcy of the liberal ideology: the solution is not a solution at all, but rather a massive grieving session. There is no solvable problem, they are telling us; the crimes of policing are elevated from the realm of politics, to the realm of tragedy. At best, we may expect some token gestures — perhaps adding some extra funding for police sensitivity training — or some other non-correction.
Our discussion above is not intended to condone anyone sitting idly by in the aftermath of police abuses, or other acts of repressive state terror. Instead, we emphasize that as we stand up and speak out, it must be to communicate the routine nature of state violence, and its constitutive importance in maintaining capitalist society. Our protests must coincide with and emanate from the project of building organizations of working class power, and specifically of Black Power. With this in mind, the message of any mass assembly is simple: To the oppressed masses, protest must communicate the rooted presence, revolutionary consciousness, fighting discipline, and unwavering solidarity of our organizations; to our enemies in the capitalist state, protest must communicate the heightened organization and rising power of the people, and the continual threat of popular rebellion against our oppressors. A peaceful assembly, called for and dismissed by the President himself, is quite the opposite: it is a demonstration of powerlessness and mass disorganization. In the words of Trotsky, such assemblies make up “a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure”. If a riot is the language of the unheard, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, then we must not let it be silenced and rendered nonthreatening by our rulers’ appeals to officially condoned sentiments of “peaceful protest.”
It is the duty of every worker — and especially those claiming class-consciousness — to not only join in the marches and protests, but to propose real and concrete solutions to the system-wide oppressions, even short of a total revolution in social relations. Black people are being murdered every day. It is not enough for us to simply point to the existence of the problem (one here hidden by consciously framing it as a “tragedy” rather than what it is — merely the every-day workings of the white supremacist state machine). It is not enough to say that the fault lies on the heads of the ruling class, that they are all collectively and individually culpable, that the state machine in the form of the police itself is to blame. We must present actual steps to resolve this century-long crisis of white terror and murder of the Black population.
The organic consciousness of the Black laboring masses have already rushed out ahead of many organizations of the working class; community control of policing (the establishment of local oversight boards with the power to cut funding or redirect it, to hold police accountable, and so on) lags behind the people. The slogan has already appeared: Abolition! Abolition of the capitalist police! Our place is standing with Black workers against the murderers in blue; our chief task is to concretize the drive for abolition into organized forms of working class power, and not allow it to be diverted into a narrative of futile grief and abstract tragedy.
We leave the reader with a passage from the Black revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, political prisoner, and martyr George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye to consider.
My brother Jonathan, a communist revolutionary to the core, writing me in June of 1969, theorized as follows:
We are quite obviously faced with a need to organize some small defenses to the more flagrant abuses of the system now. I mean this in a military sense. The period of disorganized activity, of riots and rallies, and purely political agitation/education has come to a close. The violence of the opposition has brought it to an end. We cannot raise consciousness another millimeter without a new set of tactics. Long-range political ploys alone are not practical for us. To me, the concept seems to assume that someday in the distant future we’ll produce a 700- pound flea to fight the Paper Tiger. That’s not too likely to happen. While we await the precise moment when all of capitalism’s victims will indignantly rise to destroy the system, we are being devoured in family lots at the whim of this thing. There will be no super-slave. Some of us are going to have to take our courage in hand and build a hard revolutionary cadre for selective retaliatory violence. We have numbers on our side if the whites who support revolutionary change can prevent this thing from degenerating into race war. The picture of the U.S. as a Paper Tiger is quite accurate, but there is a great deal of work to be done on its destruction and I’m of the opinion that if there is a big job of growing to do, the sooner begun the sooner done.
