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1. THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION | SOCIALISTWORKER.ORG | INTERNATIONALSOCIALIST.ORGISO
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS,
KNOW YOUR ENEMY
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS,
KNOW YOUR ENEMY

2. MARXISM & LIBERATION

3. MARXISM: THE BEST TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING
& ENDING ALL OPPRESSIONS
Marxism seeks not to separate exploitation from
issues of oppression, but to show how they are
connected and how the solution to one cannot be
separated from the solution to the other. Socialism is
not only a theory of the liberation of the working
class. It is a theory of the liberation of the working
class as the foundation for the liberation of all of
humanity.
REVOLUTIONS: “Festivals of the oppressed & exploited.”

4. THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM

5. THE #BLACKLIVESMATTER MOVEMENT
“Indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail!
The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”
Accountability is a good place to start,
but our critique must go deeper.
“Not all cops.”
Yes, all cops.

6. The movement against racist police violence is not
about individual racist, violent cops engaging in
misconduct, but about systemic problems with law
enforcement and the law:
The War on Drugs, stop-and-frisk, “broken
windows,” over-policing, criminalizing poverty,
racial profiling, mass incarceration (“the New Jim
Crow”), mass surveillance, erosion of privacy
rights, mandatory minimum sentencing,
school-to-prison pipeline, torture, police
militarization, etc.

7. Not just law enforcement and the law.
These issues go to the core of U.S. society. We
must expand our focus to include all institutions
of corporate-state power and cultural institutions
that provide ideological support.

8. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE
OF THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM?

9. CONNECT THE DOTS
RACIST
POLICE
VIOLENCE
THE WAR
ON TERROR
INCOME
INEQUALITY
INDIGENOUS
RIGHTS
STUDENT
DEBT
GENDER
INEQUALITY
ECOLOGICAL
DESTRUCTION
ANTI-
IMMIGRANT
FERVOR
MASS
INCARCERATION

10. “The problem of racism, the problem of economic
exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied
together. These are the triple evils that are
interrelated.”–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
ONE STRUGGLE,
MANY FRONTS

11. “Working-class consciousness
cannot be genuine political
consciousness unless the
workers are trained to
respond to all cases of
tyranny, oppression, violence
and abuse, no matter what
class is affected.”–V.I. Lenin
THE POLITICS
OF SOLIDARITY

12. “We do not fight racism with racism. We fight
racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative
capitalism with black capitalism. We fight capitalism
with basic socialism.”–Fred Hampton

13. CLASS SOCIETY

14. PRE-AGRICULTURAL “PRIMITIVE COMMUNISM”
Existed around the world for tens of thousands of
years. Some cultures remain to this day.
Subsistence hunting and gathering, plus horticulture.
All things beyond personal possessions were
communally owned.
No class division. Relatively flat hierarchy.
No kings, nobles, soldiers, police, or prisons.
Egalitarian, democratic, with better gender-equality.

15. 10,000
BCE
7000
BCE
3000
BCE
7000
BCE
3000
BCE
2000
BCE
3000
BCE
ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE
AGRICULTURE
TODAYHOMO SAPIENS 200,000 BCE

16. JARED DIAMOND:
“Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic
diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon
humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers
have little or no stored food, and no concentrated
food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they
live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each
day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of
social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy,
non-producing elite set itself above the
disease-ridden masses.”

17. With the development of large-scale agriculture,
for the first time, class division emerged.
A LABORING OPPRESSED CLASS
THAT PRODUCED THE SURPLUS
AN IDLE RULING CLASS
THAT APPROPRIATED THE SURPLUS

18. With class division came the
rise of states–bodies of armed
men and bureaucracies–to
buttress this division with…
++
IDEAS
FORCE

19. THE STATE

20. “The state is nothing but a machine for
the oppression of one class by another,
and indeed in the democratic republic no
less than in the monarchy.”–Frederick Engels

21. Many radicals oppose the state,
but we need to go deeper.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE STATE?
WHO DOES IT SERVE?

22. States have grown in complexity and vary in
character, but they all have the same purpose:
to repress the majority in the interest of the minority.
THE STATE IS A TOOL FOR PRESERVING CLASS RULE.

23. THE PURPOSE OF THE STATE
To facilitate and preserve the profit system.
To guarantee and make efficient the ruling class’
ability to exploit the oppressed class.
To create an order that legalizes and perpetuates this
oppression by moderating the conflict between
irreconcilably antagonistic classes.
EXPLOITATION & OPPRESSION PRODUCTION

24. IDEAS
Ideological support for the status quo
is taught via a network of state,
corporate, and cultural institutions.
Schools, religious organizations, the
news media, fiction, cinema, etc.
Socializing people for their place in society.
“The poor are lazy. The rich earned it.”
“We need a strong military to defend us.”
“Western civilization is the pinnacle of
human achievement.”

25. Force “consists not merely of armed men but also of
material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of
coercion of all kinds.”
The police and the military are the chief
instruments of state power.
These “special bodies of armed men”
grow proportionally stronger as class
antagonisms within the state become
more acute.
FORCE

26. ++
IDEAS
FORCE
MYTHOLOGY
RELIGION
PHILOSOPHY
SCIENCE
CULTURE
TRADITIONS
MEDIA
ARTS EDUCATION
BELIEFS
LAWS
POLICE
MILITARY
PRISONS
GOVERNMENT
COURT SYSTEM
STATE-FUNDED TERRORISTS
VIGILANTES
PRIVATE SECURITY FORCES
CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS
MORALITY

28. COPS

29. OUR FUNDAMENTAL ANTAGONISM IS WITH THE RULING CLASS.
THE STATE IS THEIR TOOL.
THE POLICE ARE THE TIP OF THEIR SPEAR.

30. The ruling class created the modern police in the
early-to-mid 1800s, not to stop crime or promote
justice, but to control large defiant crowds:
IN THE NORTH: Strikes and riots
IN THE SOUTH: Slave insurrections

31. Cops do not neutrally enforced the law
(and the law itself has never been neutral).
IN THE NORTH: They arrested people for the vaguely
defined crime of disorderly conduct and vagrancy
throughout the nineteenth century. Arrested
anyone they saw as a threat to order.
IN THE SOUTH: They enforced white supremacy and
arrested black people on trumped-up charges in
order to feed them into convict labor systems.

32. LAW ENFORCEMENT IS ALWAYS SELECTIVE.
THE POLICE ARE ALWAYS PROFILING WHAT PART OF THE
POPULATION AND WHICH KINDS OF BEHAVIOR TO TARGET.

33. POLICE FULFULL A RULING-CLASS MISSION:
To protect capitalism from the threat posed by its
offspring, the working class.
To suppress rebellions and strikes and to oppose
working class political advancement.
To enforce order among those with the greatest
reason to resent the system (i.e. poor Black people).
To inflict nonlethal violence upon crowds to break
them up while trying to avoid creating martyrs.

34. Any force organized to deliver routine violence is
going to kill people. For every police murder, there
are thousands of nonlethal acts of police violence,
calculated to intimidate while avoiding an angry
collective response.
MAXIMUM CONTROL WITH MINIMUM VIOLENCE.
But cops don’t need to be careful because they are
almost never held accountable for their actions–
especially against people of color, whose lives have
been devalued by racist ideology.

35. IDEAS
“Police keep the peace.”
“We need police to protect us from
each other, due to our violent,
dishonest human nature.”
“Police are heroes with very dangerous jobs.”
“A few bad apples spoil the bunch.”
“We are a nation of laws.”

36. IDEAS
COPS & ROBBERS: Dividing society
between good guys and bad guys is
perfect for identifying scapegoats,
especially racial ones.
This moralistic scheme is a direct competitor
to a class-conscious worldview, which
identifies society’s basic antagonism as the
conflict between exploiters and exploited.
Police activity thus teaches an ideology of citizenship
that dovetails with the lessons of the classroom and
the workplace.

37. ROUTINE PATROL WORK gets cops accustomed to using
violence and the threat of violence.
Prepares them to pull off the large-scale acts of
repression that are necessary when workers and the
oppressed rise up in larger groups.
Not just about getting practice with weapons and
tactics, but crucial to creating a mindset among
police that their violence is for the greater good.
Shows commanders which cops are most comfortable
inflicting pain. They can then be assigned to the
front lines when it comes to a crackdown.

38. “GOOD COPS” PROVIDE
PR COVER FOR THE
BRUTAL WORK THAT
NEEDS TO BE DONE BY
THE “BAD COPS.”

39. JOHN STEINBECK:
“Socialism never took root in America
because the poor see themselves not as an
exploited proletariat but as temporarily
embarrassed millionaires.”
SIMILARLY:
Opposition to the police never took root in
America because people see the police not
as armed enforcers of capital but as
temporarily confused workers.

40. ARE COPS WORKING CLASS?
Cops come from working-class backgrounds, but
are grafted onto the ruling class to act as their
enforcers. Cops are professional class traitors.

41. “THE WORKER WHO BECOMES A POLICEMAN
IN THE SERVICE OF THE CAPITALIST STATE,
IS A BOURGEOIS COP, NOT A WORKER.”
–Leon Trotsky

42. We need to eradicate the liberal notion that if we
articulate our grievances precisely enough the police
won’t bash our heads in.
WE CAN’T REASON WITH CLASS RULE.
Cops who quit or turn in other cops for misconduct
have no effect on the structural nature of law
enforcement as the enforcers of the ruling class.

43. RACE & RACISM

44. “You can’t have capitalism
without racism.”–Malcolm X

45. Because capitalism enriches a minority that live off
the majority's labor, it requires various tools to divide
the majority—racism and all oppressions under
capitalism serve this purpose.
Oppressions are intersectional, reinforcing and
compounding each other.
CLASS OPPRESSION IS THE PIVOT AROUND WHICH
ALL OTHER INEQUALITIES AND OPPRESSIONS TURN.
To understand intersectionality is not enough. We
must understand the root of all oppressions.

46. RACISM IS NOT AN END IN ITSELF.
RACISM IS A LYNCHPIN OF U.S. CAPITALISM.

47. Many radicals oppose white supremacist racism,
but we need to go deeper.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF RACISM?
WHO DOES IT SERVE?

48. RACISM’S FUNCTION:
To justify plunder, conquest, slavery,
and inequality.
To divide and conquer. To impede class unity.
To pit one section of the working class
against another.
To blunt class consciousness. To cause
confusion as to who our allies and enemies are.
To obscure our place in history and the
current landscape.
To supress wages and conditions for all workers.
To better exploit the entire working class.
1
2
3
4

49. UNDER CAPITALISM, ALL WORKERS ARE EXPLOITED. Some
workers face added oppression because of racism,
sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant ideas, religious
oppression, etc.
RACISM HAS REAL MATERIAL CONSEQUENCES. In every
measure of the quality of life in the U.S., whites are
on the top and Blacks are on the bottom.
WHITE WORKERS CONFER BENEFITS FROM RACISM
–and the illusion that the system is working for
them–otherwise racism would not work at dividing
Black and white workers.

50. But… as Black living standards fall, downward
pressure is exerted on the living standards of the
entire working class.
BOSSES ARE THE BIGGEST BENEFICIARIES of race-based
wage disparities and decreased wages across the
entire working class.

51. To the extent that they accept white supremacy
and fail to unite with their class allies (of all
races, nationalities, genders, etc.), white
workers contribute to capitalism's ability to
exploit them more effectively.
RACISM IS CENTRAL TO THE OPPRESSION
OF THE ENTIRE WORKING CLASS.

52. “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish
worker as a competitor who lowers his standard
of life. … This antagonism is the secret of the
impotence of the English working class, despite
its organization. It is the secret by which the
capitalist maintains its power.”–Karl Marx

53. “The hostility between the whites and blacks of the
South is easily explained. … masters secured their
ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks
by putting enmity between them. They divided both to
conquer each. …By the rich slave-master, they [poor
whites] are already regarded as but a single remove
from equality with the slave.”–Frederick Douglass

54. “The race philosophy came as a new and terrible thing
to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness
impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers
could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the
Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South
made impossible.”–W.E.B. Du Bois

55. CAPITALISM HAS GIVEN RISE TO IDEOLOGIES
THAT JUSTIFY, EXPLAIN, AND PERPETUATE IT.
IN THE U.S., RACISM IS ONE OF THE MOST
IMPORTANT OF THESE IDEOLOGIES.

56. “THE IDEAS OF THE RULING CLASS ARE IN
EVERY EPOCH THE RULING IDEAS.”–Karl Marx
They use “the means of mental production” to
present the capitalist system as the highest ideal,
to perpetuate ideas of a violent, competitive,
sexist, racist, and immutable human nature, and
to make class divisions seem natural and the way
things have always been.

57. COPS ENFORCE THE RULING IDEAS.
Cops ensure the maintenance of the dominant
material relations through the enforcement of
private property, debt collection, regulation of
“moral conduct” and drug laws (so workers
remain a valuable to their bosses), and the
appropriation of wealth from and general
harassment of people of color and the poor.

58. REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

59. We support genuine reforms. But the term “reform”
is often applied to entrenchment of the status quo.
And toothless or surface reforms are often used as
pacification tools to diffuse popular movements.
REFORMS WILL NEVER GET AT THE ROOT OF OUR PROBLEMS.
Exploitation and oppressions are built into the very
nature of capitalism. They are not determined by
and cannot be eliminated by decisions of the
capitalist class, police officers, politicians, or by
laws of the state. They cannot be politely or
gradually reformed away.

60. Demands from the national Black Lives Matter
movement combine near-term reforms and goals that
would require the wholesale dismantling of core U.S.
institutions.
RACISM CANNOT BE ELIMINATED
WITHOUT ELIMINATING CAPITALISM.
THE POLICE CANNOT BE (SUFFICIENTLY) REFORMED.
As revolutionaries, we have ambitious goals!
But we must work toward them by doing what we can
in the here and now.

61. Reform and revolution are not opposed to each other,
but intertwined. Struggle for reform is key because:
» Only mass, militant struggle can win reforms.
The biggest reforms come when the ruling class
feels its control over society and its institutions are
most threatened.
» Ordinary people come together and get radicalized.
» Only through struggle for reform—and any struggle
short of revolution is a struggle for reform—is it
possible to move beyond reform to seek revolution.

62. THE PRIMACY OF PROTEST
Pressure from below forces elected officials and
bosses to accept reform.
Mass demonstrations, strikes, occupations, and
uprisings mobilize and organize the power of the
people–critical to building a revolutionary movement.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FERGUSON & BALTIMORE: RESISTANCE.

63. “POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND.”
–Frederick Douglass

64. BIBLIOGRAPHY
State & Revolution by Vladimir Lenin The German Ideology by Karl Marx
What is to Be Done? by Vladimir Lenin Where Do We Go From Here? By Martin Luther King Jr.
Origins of the Police by David Whitehouse The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen
Where We Stand: The Politics of the ISO The Politics of Identity by Sharon Smith
Who Killed Eric Garner? by Salar Mohandesi Pyramid of the Capitalist System by Speldwright
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels
Race, Class & Marxism by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People by Sam Mitrani
Five Liberal Tendencies that Plagued Occupy by Juan Conatz
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond
Police Reform is Impossible in America by Donovan X. Ramsey
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser