The great surge of protests across the world sparked by the killing of George Floyd is bringing a new generation of young activists.
They deserve more than the hurried reforms now offered here and there in the USA.
Reforms can stick, deepen, become a lever for more, but only through the work of a movement which works and educates week by week, year after year.
The unequal toll of the pandemic, the shredding of health care and social provision, the cascade of job cuts, the climate emergency, show a whole world needs to be changed, and simultaneously on many fronts.
In a society ruled by the profiteers who depend on exploiting the working class and dividing us, local against migrant, this-ethnicity against that-ethnicity, police, even if renamed “community safety”, will always protect property and target the worst-off.
The pressures of a society of insecurity and violence will bear down to make it secure for the well-off, by violence against the worst-off.
As the Minneapolis bus workers’ union puts it, “we need a new Civil Rights Movement… joined with the labour movement”.
A joining-up of the new young activists with the backbones of workplace organisation and community struggle, with unity and with autonomy for the diverse components.
A renewed labour movement aiming for nothing less than socialism, a workers’ government, the replacement of profit as the motor of society by human solidarity and equality.
Democratic community self-policing can become a reality only in a society of democratic community economics. And to win that we need a movement that will turn around economic life, to centre on solidarity and social provision rather than on profit-making.
