Via our comrades at Millions March NYC:
STATEMENT IN SOLIDARITY WITH
LOS ANGELES #DECOLONIZELACITYHALL
AND CHICAGO #FREEDOMSQUARE
Since the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we have witnessed attempts by the political establishment to suppress the justified rage of the people and inhibit our mobilization. These attempts range from the outright use of force by police to elected officials pacifying our resistance by advocating for meaningless reforms and co-opting progressive rhetoric with no actual intent to alter the status quo.
Despite our continued calls for change, there exists none. Instead, the racist state has increased the flow of military weapons and equipment along with billions of dollars of funding for police while our communities suffer from lack of jobs, unaffordable housing, underfunded education, and inadequate medical and mental health resources.
Every single day we witness state-sanctioned executions of Black and Brown people at the hands of the police with zero accountability.
We go to sleep seeing hashtags with the names of our kinfolk murdered by killer kkkops, and wake up seeing fresh, new hashtags.
Nation-wide, increasingly repressive legal measures and new means of social control are being implemented, fueling the expansion of the prison-industrial complex and the increased persecution of activists and political prisoners. The state’s continued reinforcement of the repressive police apparatus corresponds directly with the social and economic system that has brought enormous wealth to a tiny few at the expense of the majority of the world’s people, who suffer daily from the decay and destruction of capitalism. Those that continue to uphold and legitimize the current system have made it abundantly clear that they are indifferent to Black suffering, willing to profit from Black death, and are against the movement for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people.
In New York City, we live under a magnifying glass of a parasitic wealthy elite and political class who wield an army of thugs in blue that prey on communities of color. Just this past week, following years of escalating grassroots resistance, we ousted Bill Bratton—a racist police commissioner trained in state-of-the-art tactics of repression and occupation. The NYPD routinely arrests Black, Brown, and working-class people for minor acts in order to exploit our communities for municipal revenue, and they continue to kill us with zero consequences. We want to send a clear message that if we can hold one accountable, we can hold two accountable—and if we can hold two accountable, we can hold them all accountable. We are expecting more of the same from Bratton’s replacement and, as our demands indicate, we are organizing to bring about the abolition of the entire oppressive police institution.
Our immediate demands are thus:
Defund the NYPD and reinvest resources into Black, Brown, and working-class communities
Reparations for the victims’ families and survivors of police brutality from the NYPD’s budget
It is with these objectives that we stand in full solidarity with our comrades in Los Angeles and Chicago in establishing a foothold of resistance in public spaces to escalate our struggle and resolutely fight for police abolition, not reform. We cannot fix an oppressive system that is not broken—it was designed to be violent and racist, and every day we are tragically reminded that it is working exceptionally well, as was intended.
We have marched, protested, and interrupted traffic for years—and will continue to do so—but now it is time that we escalate our organizing to urgently build our own power in a mass, militant, integrated abolitionist movement, separate from the state and 2 party capitalist system.
We realize that the important work is what happens in-between demonstrations, and it is in building principled unity with bastions of resistance in our communities that we will win. We must expose the true nature of this system and create our own organs of revolutionary power to render the current oppressive structures obsolete.
We believe that Black lives matter.
We are unapologetically anti-capitalist.
We are unapologetically anti-police.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
#ShutDownCityHallNYC
#AbolitionSquare
Follow Millions March NYC for information on how to plug into the moevement.