One Struggle joined protesters in the June 2020 Miami demonstrations for justice for George Floyd and in solidarity with uprisings in Minneapolis and cities all over the United States. The following is a text from a flyer that we brought to the protests. Spontaneous uprisings are a tool for the masses to make their demands and struggles heard on a global scale, but if we aren’t laying the groundwork for independent organizations in the moments between, we will be stuck in loops of reacting to the violence inflicted on us by the capitalist class without having the power to effect change. We use flyers and other forms of agitation and propaganda in the hopes that the momentum of these moments can be directed towards the building of a combative mass movement so that justice can be served for people like George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Eric Reason, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and so many more. This racist capitalist system will continue to kill us, poison us and exploit us until we rise up against it. It is up to us to gather our forces and fight back! Get in touch, get organized!
When Black protestors in Minneapolis stare out of live feeds of fires and clouds of tear gas and tell us they’re exhausted, we don’t need to wonder what they mean. We’ve had decades of reading the names of Black people killed by police, hunted by white supremacists, and hounded by reactionaries at every level of society. George Floyd was not the first Black man in this decade to cry “I can’t breathe” while being choked by a cop. This isn’t the first time in this decade we’ve echoed those cries in the street.
Some of us realized for the first time how little our lives matter to bourgeois institutions who let service laborers, healthcare laborers, and chronically ill and old people die and get thrown into mass graves under the pressure of a global pandemic. This is not exceptional – this is a peak behind a curtain that has long been open to Black, brown, poor, and working class communities all over the country. It’s a bald look at the interests of politicians, cops, billionaires, and bureaucrats alike – the interests that drive our entire capitalist and imperialist arrangement.
The capitalist state with its courts, schools, media, and policing has generations of study and practice in dominating and exploiting us, using oppressive and repressive measures (like slavery, whiteness, and redlining) to thwart our unity and power. They’ve murdered us and abandoned us. They’ve forced us into illness, starvation, sterility, debt, and desperation. We are being called to resist and destroy these homicidal structures, not make kinder cops or pleasant prisons. While we do this and in order to do this, we must simultaneously build our own structures of organization and resistance independent of capitalist interests and its inherently racist state.
Our collective liberation from racism and all forms of oppression is intertwined in the fight against this entire capitalist and imperialist mess! Let’s utilize protests, shut downs, blockades and uprisings as a means of growing organization, organized relationships, and strengthening our forces to fight this rotten system!
