Renee Good is a Victim in the Class War. ICE is Illegitimate. Laws are written to Defend Capitalists not Workers.

Richard Mellor

After the killing  of Renee Good by a masked thug in Minneapolis, I found myself embroiled in the details of legality as I am sure many others have. This is not an accident, this is how the issue will be laid out by the capitalist mass media. He was doing his job as a federal agent, and Good was obstructing that. She was blocking the road etc. etc.  The Democrats, will also limit their opposition to what is legal and what is not. What is constitutional and what is not. 

 

One thing we know about Trump; he doesn’t care about the law. He doesn’t care about the Constitution., nor do any of them when their class interests are threatened. And while the Constitution has many important aspects to it, as does the Declaration of Independence, a more militant document, in the end our rights and material conditions as workers, the rights that nurture us are the product of mass action, violating laws and resistance to state violence. The Declaration of Independence states:

 

“….Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

 

U.S. history is one of a continuous battle between the ruling elite and the exploited, from the resistance to genocide by the indigenous population to the slave revolts and the struggle to build unions. The US ruling class is the most ruthless and violent on the planet and today, it is the most destabilizing force and source of state terrorism. It is a danger to us all.

 

I happened to watch Nate the Lawyer, (the video above) a You Tuber, after a long absence but his take on the Renee Good tragedy brought me down to earth a bit and reminded me of how I normally respond when anti-worker, anti-union laws or laws that restrict working class power are used against us. We have to build a mass movement and violate these laws; we cannot accept them as legitimate as having some sort of divine origin. Might is Right can be our slogan too

 

We can go round and round about the laws which is a no win game for us as our class enemies write them. In cases such as these and injunctions against strikes or protests, the issue of the law should not be the determinant as far as workers are concerned. It is a class issue. Do we accept the ICE thugs are actually friends of working people doing public good and protecting workers interests?  Of course not. They are an armed force of the state and they are the enemy of working class people. 

 

I am not advocating we go out and individually take shots at them but we can't apply their laws to issues like this. We should also remind ourselves that the Second Amendment gives us the right to own a gun, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”, it says. We have a right to build community self defence organizations and to arm ourselves; we need not let the right wing own the Second Amendment.  I am not advocating some sort of guerrilla warfare. It is the united power of the working class in action that can counter the thugs the capitalist class send it to our neighborhoods. The Pinkertons were a famous private army used against workers in history as were the slave patrols and groups like the Texas Rangers, if need be the military although this is a riskier option.

 

The issue for us is we oppose ICE and we do not accept them as legitimate in any way.  As the state increases its war against working people it will not limit its violence to the most oppressed, unorganised and weakest sections of our class; they will increasingly weigh in on the wider working class, our unions and organisations. Trump is looking to hire another 10,000 ICE thugs and we know who will be applying for those jobs. There are already 20,000 and they are increasing the budget as well.

The dominant narrative is about legality but we can’t win that one. If a judge issues an injunction to declare a successful strike illegal we have to mobilize to violate that injunction. When Biden went to the legislature and introduced legislation that declared a legal strike by rail workers illegal, the labor leadership should have mobilized rank and file power to violate that law. Their laws are basically straight jackets aimed at supressing dissent. Propaganda and violence are to two sides of that coin.

 

As a note. In the UK, which is very much following the US road here, thousands of people are being arrested for wearing a Palestinian flag, or holding a placard against the Israeli genocide. There are others on hunger strike for acts blocking sales or transportation of weapons the UK sends in support of the genocide. This is all because the group organizing such protests has been declared a terrorist organization. 

Both in the UK and the US, the pathetic role of the heads of organised labor stands out once again as absent from the scene, empty phrases and letters of support are not enough and a an internal struggle is needed to bring the potential power of the organized workers to the table.

I think Nate’s video is worth watching as a reminder that the law isn’t for us. Our power is due to class unity and the willingness to fight for power. For me, we cannot make capitalism fair, it is an inherently violent and exploitative system. It’s time to break out of the mould and see that only a democratic socialist system of production, a global federation of democratic socialist states can prevent the present gangsters that control our lives from taking us over the abyss.