‘Defund Police’ Is Marxist, Not Anti-Racist

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SEATTLE (ChurchMilitant.com) - "Defund the police" is a communist plot to destroy private property; it is not about the problem of "bad cops," a 2018 letter to the leader of Seattle's "occupied autonomous zone" reveals.

International Marxist movement Left Voice rebuked CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) leader Kshama Sawant, a Seattle City Council member, for voting in Carmen Best to become Seattle's first permanent African American police chief, insisting that socialism is "impossible without smashing the institution of the police."

"This is not a problem of 'bad cops' — even if 'good people' become cops, they play this oppressive role," historian Nathaniel Flakin of Left Voice wrote to Sawant, the first Trotskyite from the Socialist Alternative Party to be elected to public office.

Police Prevent Socialist Takeover

"We have seen examples of this all over the country. It does not make any difference if women or people of color are made police chiefs, just as U.S. capitalism did not become any less racist after the election of the first black president," Flakin argued.

"Socialists, going back to Karl Marx, have always been irreconcilably hostile to the police because the police are the 'chief instruments of state power,' as Lenin put it," he added.

"Every successful revolution in history has involved working people standing up to the police and winning," Falkin stressed. "In every successful mass uprising, the police are forced to surrender and drop their weapons."

Flakin explained how the "traditional Marxist demand — to break up the police and replace them with self-defense organizations democratically organized by working people — can reach a larger audience than ever before" if it could be widely recognized how "police murder black men while enjoying complete immunity" and "regularly protect neo-Nazis."

"Voting for a police chief because some community members are in favor of electing an African American uses extremely dangerous logic" as "the police exist to defend the private property of a tiny minority of capitalists" and have "as their main function the protection of the property of the wealthy," Flakin explained.

CHAZ Leader Criticized

Meanwhile, critics have blasted Sawant's privileged past as an Indian immigrant from the Hindu "Brahmin" priestly caste — India's worst oppressors who kept millions of lower castes and untouchables ("Dalits") subjugated for over 3,000 years.

"Unlike a slave, who could set himself free, a caste man could never set himself free," observes Indian scholar Anand Teltumbde in Dalits: Past, Present and Future, adding, "Slavery did not rob slaves of the consciousness of their human selves, which occasionally erupted into revolts."

"In slavery, there is an intrinsic hope of transcending the system, whereas in the caste system one does not have any such hope," since slavery "does not have any religious sanction as castes claim," Teltumbde writes.

"A number of scholars regard the oppression of Dalits worse than slavery since the caste system completely dehumanized an untouchable," an Indian female academic from a low-caste background told Church Militant. "Dalit slavery continues today as Dalits in parts of India are forced to clean the dry toilets of the upper castes and carry human excreta in wicker baskets on their heads."

"Sawant, whose real surname is 'Iyengar,' a Brahmin caste name, should be deported back to India. She has immigrated from one of the world's most oppressed cultures to the world's beacon of freedom and she is attempting to destroy a country Abraham Lincoln called 'the last best hope of earth,'" the academic (who hails from Sawant's home state of Maharashtra and has a post-graduate degree in American literature) remarked.

Born to Vasundhara and H. T. Ramanujam Iyengar in Pune, Maharashtra in 1973, Sawant grew up in Mumbai and became a U.S. citizen in 2010. In 2012, Sawant stood as a Socialist Alternative candidate for the Seattle City Council election against Democratic Washington statehouse speaker Frank Chopp, defeating him by over 20,000 votes.

The councilwoman lives in an $800,000 home but has railed against gentrification of Seattle, the Daily Mail revealed. The Seattle Times likened her to "the Queen in 'Alice in Wonderland,' [who] has one answer to every question, and it is always some form of 'off with their heads.'"

Millions of Dalits in India, ontologically regarded as subhuman by the caste system, converted to Christianity, recognizing the Genesis theme of God creating human beings in His image and likeness.

Agenda Exposed, Opposed

Left Voice has continued to expose its anti-police, communist agenda. "Police are not workers; they are the armed force of the bosses and have no place in the labor movement," the publication declared Saturday.

"The police were originally formed to hunt down slaves, break strikes and disrupt protests," Left Voice stated, citing Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. "From its inception in the 19th century, the police has been the enemy of workers."

The Catholic Church teaches, "Private property or some ownership of external goods confers on everyone a sphere wholly necessary for the autonomy of the person and the family, and it should be regarded as an extension of human freedom" (Gaudium et Spes, 71).

"Religious socialism, Christian socialism are contradictory terms, for no one can be, at the same time, a good Catholic and a true socialist," Pope Pius XI declared. Pope Pius XII's 1949 "Decree against Communism" excommunicates all Catholics collaborating with or voting for communist organizations.

The Catholic Magisterium expressed clear opposition to socialism and communism in the papal encyclicals Nostis et Nobiscum (1849), Quanta Cura (1864) and Rerum Novarum (1891).

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