the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 26, 2025
Five years after the explosion of protests against the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, governments and businesses across the country are going back on the promises of reform they made at the time.
Police across this country have killed around three civilians a day for many years. But on May 25, 2020, white Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin brutally killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Floyd cried out “I can’t breathe” 27 times before dying. Chauvin casually recorded the death as a “medical incident.” Fortunately, 17-year-old bystander Darnella Frazier posted a video of the murder, which went viral. Hundreds of angry neighbors flooded the 3rd District police station, to the point where the mayor ordered the staff to evacuate by helicopter from the roof. In the following weeks and months, millions of people around the country and the world protested—black, white, native-born, immigrant, young, old, in small towns, in suburbs, and in cities.
Protestors demanded legal reforms of policing and the reallocation of money from police to counseling. That year and in 2021, states passed more than 140 law enforcement oversight bills, with the federal government and local governments also changing laws. Big corporations like Walmart, McDonald’s, Google, and Minneapolis-based Target pledged to spend 50 billion dollars to welcome black customers.
But the foundations of the society stayed the same. It’s a capitalist society based on exploitation, founded on slavery. After slavery, institutionalized racism condemned the black population to the bottom ranks of “free labor,” with worse unemployment, more poverty, worse medical care and schools. In the South, police developed out of patrols that caught and brutalized enslaved people who ran away. In the North, large-scale police forces were organized to attack striking workers.
The role of the police in this capitalist society has always been to enforce vast inequality by controlling the population, which means by using violence.
Cops still kill black Americans at three times the rate they kill white Americans, and they get away with it. The number of prosecutions for these killings has not gone up. Fewer than two percent of police shootings lead to indictments. In May, a Tennessee jury acquitted three former Memphis cops of murder in the 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols. A Michigan jury deadlocked on second-degree murder for the cop who shot Patrick Lyoya to death in Grand Rapids in 2022. Also in May, the Trump administration ended federal oversight of cops in Minneapolis and in Louisville, Kentucky, where cops killed Breonna Taylor in 2020. And Trump nags big corporations to end their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, so they are self-interestedly slashing that spending.
Protestors in 2020 thought the system could be fixed. But the system is not broken. It is doing what it was designed to do: enforce capitalist exploitation with violence. Protests will have to take on the capitalist system itself, and its state. This means workers using their power as the class which makes society run and produces the wealth.