Internationalist Perspective 60 appears at a moment of heightened social tensions, and widespread social movements from the US to Greece and Sweden, from China to Mexico, which have their roots in the grim reality of a crisis of capitalism that has not been ameliorated over the past seven years, and which beyond its manifestation as a massive financial crisis (with new upheavals to come), manifests itself as a surplus of humanity, whose very labor power can no longer be profitably exploited by capital. What links all movements that are now erupting globally is capital’s recourse to police brutality directed at the very unrest provoked by the degrading conditions in which an evergrowing mass of the population is condemned to live, a brutality that includes police shootings of unarmed people on an ever-greater scale. Whether it is the use of lethal force against immigrant youth in Husby or Ragsved in Stockholm, or the anniversary of police killings of demonstrators in Athens; whether it is the brutality against demonstrators by the cops in Hong Kong, the cold- blooded murder of dozens of students in Mexico on their way to a demonstration, or the killing of unarmed black men by police in Ferguson and Staten Island, the roots of these assaults by the forces of order lie in the effort to protect and to buttress the basic social relations of capitalism itself.
Read More →