EDITORIAL
Violence:
the Base of “American Democracy”

Jul 28, 2024

“No place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence”—this was President Biden’s first public reaction to the assassination attempt on former President Trump.

Trump quickly posted a one-word statement on Truth Social: “AGREED!”

“Violence,” Biden added, “violence has no place in our American democracy.”

In fact, violence is exactly what “American democracy” rests on. Violence is the means through which the American capitalist class, a tiny minority, imposes its rule on the majority, that is, on the working class, whose labor produces the material wealth, the food, goods and services society needs.

Yes, of course, Trump and Biden oppose violence when it hits people like themselves. But oppose violence? The two of them? Forget it!

Biden and Trump and presidents before them signed authorizations for U.S. military resources to be used against civilians in other countries. The U.S. military is implicated today in wars from Gaza to Ukraine to the “shadow wars” in Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and Syria.

U.S. corporations invest all over the world, stealing wealth in raw materials, stealing wealth from the labor of low-paid workers. The U.S. government and its military back up their theft.

Not only is violence directed at draining wealth from other countries, thus impoverishing their people, for the benefit of the U.S. capitalist class. Violence is directed in this country at the American working class, the force whose labor provides wealth for this same capitalist class.

From the movement for the eight-hour day, begun in 1883, right up to the law passed by Congress and signed by Biden in 2022, blocking a national railroad strike, the big attempts of workers to improve their situation, to work fewer hours, to have safer workplaces, were all met with violence.

In 1883, leaders of the movement were condemned to death. In the 1980s, police forces from all over descended on Ottumwa Iowa, attacking picket lines that went up in support of striking workers fired by Hormel. In 1997, the leader of the big UPS strike was removed from the union by the federal courts, threatened with prison time. Gains of the strike were taken back. In 2022, organizers of the rail strike would have faced prison time if the strike had gone on. Their union faced such large fines, it would have run out of money.

Whether explicit like the death penalty, or implicit like the blocking of a strike with legal barriers and the courts, the state apparatus of the capitalists stands ready to use violence or its threat against workers who mobilize themselves.

From the Reconstruction movement of the 1860s up to the massive protests that erupted with the murder of George Floyd, the attempts of people to stand up for basic human rights have been met by violence. Many of the civil rights activists of the 1960s were assassinated: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., George Jackson, the Mississippi 3 (Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner), Viola Liuzzo.

Today, young men face death in the street because violence is capitalist society’s answer to poverty, to mental problems, and to the desperation that both create. More often than not, those killed were in the wrong place at the wrong time and gave an answer the cops didn’t like. Malice Green, in 1992 Detroit, was beaten to death. Freddie Gray, in 2015 Baltimore, was given a deadly “rough ride.” Breonna Taylor, in 2020 Louisville, was killed, sleeping in her bed, in an apartment cops entered by mistake. Every year, some thousand more are killed.

Do Biden and Trump dare to pretend that violence has no place in American democracy? In the 1960s, H. Rap Brown already answered that absurd claim: “Violence is as American as Cherry Pie.”

A minority of extremely wealthy people rule over the big majority, and get their wealth by exploiting the labor of the majority. And that theft is imposed by the violence of the state. Violence is the reality on which “American democracy” rests.

The working class will find no way to provide a decent life for itself and the rest of humanity until it faces that fact of life, until it organizes itself to defend against the capitalist state and its violence.