September 15, 2017 saw the acquittal of murderous pig Jason Stockley by “Judge” Timothy Wilson. In 2011, Stockley hunted, chased, and murdered Anthony Lamar Smith after allegedly witnessing him conduct a drug deal. During the chase he firmly declared his intention to “kill this motherfucker”, was in possession of an AK-47 rifle (his own personal weapon, which pigs are supposedly not allowed to have on duty), and then proceeded to plant a weapon on Smith’s body. This was all recorded on camera, and the prosecution’s other evidence was more than enough to warrant an easy conviction. Of course, even if this were the case, if the business of the police is to serve as the judge, jury, and executioner of petty drug dealers, they should start with themselves, as everyone knows that many of the disgraceful individuals who populate the STLMPD and gorge themselves on money stolen from the working black people of the city are up to their necks in drug trafficking themselves. The most likely situation is that Anthony Lamar Smith did nothing wrong except offend the sensibilities of the pig Stockley who saw himself, and still sees himself, as final decider of who gets to live and who gets to die on the streets of Saint Louis. Regardless of the pig judge’s verdict, the people’s verdict has been seen by all who have been paying attention to the various livestreams, local reporting/citizen journalists, and on the ground activists who spread news of actions and other pertinent information through Twitter and Facebook. The national news media has placed a virtual media blockade on our city over the past two weeks as they are afraid of our rebellion and do not want the struggle to be felt outside of our city and inspire others who deal with similar situations. Yet, news gets out and people are paying attention and learning from the STL struggle. Once again, they find out that blackouts can not stop the growing surge in struggle in this country.

The police, National Guard, Missouri State Highway Patrol, Eric Greitens, Lyda Krewson, and other members of the menagerie of pigs at the taxpayer trough both Democrat and Republican were, naturally, aware of the inevitable outcome of the capitalist-imperialist system trying one of its own enforcers. Anybody who believed that Wilson would find Stockley (there was no jury trial, Stockley waived this right and opted for a bench trial, AKA pigs get off scott free) guilty for murder was wilfully deluding themselves. Cops don’t go to prison for killing black people, because the cops do not serve black people. The justice system and other elements of this country’s makeup were set up by and for the benefit of white settlers, European exploiters. Not for the enslaved Africans kidnapped from their homeland. The barricades and plywood went up when various local activists declared that a series of actions, day after day, to “shut down” the city would be the result of a not-guilty verdict. So, of course, when the magic words escaped pig Wilson’s pen and mouth on September 15th, the people gathered downtown, assembled by various individual activists and word of mouth. The verdict announcement was preceded by a visit from pig Greitens to our city, at which Greitens was presented directly with a joint statement signed by Revolutionary Action – STL and other comradely local organizations with whom we wage struggle in the streets. On the day of the verdict the police did not hesitate to appear in broad daylight in full riot gear, and the first arrests were made. The image of an elderly woman being brutally detained by several riot pigs after being maced directly, along with several others, struck and shocked the conscious people of the entire world. This was just a taste of what was to come and what still is to come. A RevAction comrade was brutalized and arrested in the process of attempting to provide medical assistance to this elderly comrade in the midst of what can, without exaggeration, be adequately described as a war zone. Others were arrested as well, as roughly and brutally as they could have been.

These were then taken to jail where they were subjected to physical and psychological torture, including being told that the police would make them lose their jobs, forcing nonmale comrades to strip completely naked in the company of male inmates, police, and correctional officers, and depriving comrades of access to medications and medical attention for injuries sustained by the police. This began a continuing sequence of blatant and obvious police overkill, harassment, and brutality against activists both militant and “peaceful”, witnessed by millions of people all around the world. Everyone has seen images of STL City, County, and MO state pigs macing women and children, dragging them across streets, tackling them into tables and chairs at the Galleria on September 23rd, borrowing the well known chant “Whose Streets, Our Streets” to sarcastically mock those who were beaten, maced and arrested on the night of September 17 when several dozen individuals, including an undercover pig and active duty member of the US imperialist military, were surrounded by a mob of riot pigs on a downtown street, maced directly in their faces, stepped on, and dragged off to jail. Vengeance was also obtained, much to the chagrin of the pigs and their backers. Several were injured on the first weekend, unfortunately, none badly enough to cause death. The house of the flip flopping wishy-washy Democrat machine tool Lyda “Lyin’ Lyda” Krewson was also besieged and several windows broken. Each and every incident of pig wrongdoing and brutality has been meticulously and carefully documented by comrades who are preparing to combat and file legal cases against the offending agencies, so it would be repetitive and tiresome to report them all in this document. Know, however, that activists here have been subject to intense and blatant state repression going all the way back to the very first days of the Ferguson uprising.

Many veterans of that struggle are present in the streets everyday, and many are called out by name by the pigs. Many veterans of that struggle are behind bars, or dead in mysterious circumstances. Many new comrades are receiving the first taste of what those who stand with and for the people receive in Saint Louis, and the USA as a whole. The actions of the police the past couple weeks that have been played across your television screen are the acts of a dying order. As revolutionaries and Communists, we know that dying classes commit desperate, heinous acts to try to grasp at whatever straws they can and strike fear into the hearts of the people in their militant upsurge. They always fail. This, of course, was expected. The nature of the American system has always been and will always be semi-fascistic, if we define fascism as open rule and terrorism committed against the masses of people by the most exploitative and reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie (class which owns capital, aka the class which employs you). Slavery was fascistic. Jim Crow was fascistic. Only a fascistic system would drag our undocumented comrades out of hospitals and schools and send them back to countries destabilized by the US imperialist system in the first place. Only a fascistic system would give a Jason Stockley power to kill and a Timothy Wilson the power to say “not guilty” in an obvious case of murder. Only a fascistic system would give us Trump, Obama, Bushes I and II, Clinton, Reagan, and others and parade them as heroes to be idolized by schoolchildren. We have always lived under some form of fascism or other.

Living under a police state does not breed docile, passive individuals. The opportunists who always appear after an uprising trying to parlay their access to media attention and resources always attempt to police the people, their expression, and control narratives to drag the militant movement and activists away from the correct line of march and back onto the same path of “use the movement to get rich/get noticed/get office”. It works less and less every time. The people are not fools, the people are not tools to be played with and abused. People will simply not stand for being directed around and around in circles, told to “shut up” when they break the paths determined between organizers and the police, or being attacked as “opportunists” by those who are the real opportunists as shown by their willingness to shake hands with the pig Governor and police, turn over or seek information about militants who may or may not have committed offenses against capitalist property, expel militants from marches, and generally promote undemocratic and cliquish trends in the mass movement. One does not simply call the people to the streets and then denounce the militant elements in the morning. Nor does one attempt to place a curfew on protests. This is opportunistic playing with the people. The people stay out as long as they want and do whatever they want. It is a fundamental human right to rebel in any way, shape, or form, verbally, physically, with and without arms. A peaceful protest is no threat, fundamentally, to the order of things that continues to kill. A revolution is not a peaceful protest, it is an organized, disciplined, protracted contest of arms with the enemy. Without this understanding of revolution, you will not be successful in seizing power and laying out a new order. Neither is a revolution a rebellion by a small group of armed people. This approach was attempted in the 1970s by groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Black Liberation Army. These groups had little to no mass links and attempted to pursue an ultra-left militarist line and it was thus easy for the fascist state to surround, isolate, and destroy them. A revolution is a protracted war, rooted in and relying on the masses, waged from revolutionary base areas. Without mass ties and firm mass links, interrelationship between the people’s army controlled by the people’s party and the masses, and a united front of all progressive elements that can be united in support of the people’s war and mobilized to support the armed struggle, you are not waging a revolution. Peaceful protests, of course, can be part of a revolutionary strategy, but they are not in and of themselves revolutionary.

Leadership is determined by the people and the people alone. Any movement that tolerates those who are friendly with the police or reactionary class elements/political forces is not a genuinely proletarian mass movement. It is a heinous and almost laughable fact that those who denounce the police to the mountaintops will then sit down with them and their handlers in secret. Who is the opportunist? We also reject the identitarian notion that leadership is determined by identity alone. Leadership is determined by political line. Who is consistently on the side of the people? Who is consistently opposed to the people? Who sits with who? Who eats with who? Who gets money from who? There are black enemies of the people, and there are white comrades. The trend of denouncing white militants as “anarchists, outside elements, and agitators” is a ridiculous one. This isn’t to say that irresponsible white adventurism is not a threat to black militants, but it is not a correct tactic or strategy to seek to isolate or attack genuine comrades because of their skin color. This is a cancer in the movement, it sows bad blood and vengeance exacted upon comrades, and it aids the State in their goal to isolate, destroy, and split up revolutionary elements. Ironically, this is also a racist line, as it implies that black people are too foolish to rebel on their own! No political process can function smoothly with backbiting, gossip, and other forms of organizational/political liberalism run amok. This type of behavior only serves the enemy. Other examples of dangerous behavior are: attempting to physically remove certain militant elements from the “peaceful protest”, yelling at comrades for using different, more revolutionary chants than the same old “This is What Democracy Looks like” (more like “this is what a fascist state looks like), and sideying comrades in masks and who refuse to be in photographs. We are not doing this for Facebook attention, we are doing this for revolution. People mask up for a reason. Do not ask them why. People refuse to appear in photographs for a reason. Do not ask them why. You have no right to, and your liberalism puts people at risk.

Where will our vengeance come from? How will we get real justice for Anthony Lamar Smith, Isaiah Hammett, Mike Brown, Darren Seals, and the countless other victims of police brutality caused by the capitalist-imperialist system in our city, state, country and world? In the final analysis, America is not salvageable. A country founded with human beings as capital on stolen land is not capable of being reformed or transformed into something worthy of being called home for black and brown people. America must be destroyed as a political entity to liberate the nations of people that it has enslaved and exploited. To do so requires the organization, training, and political education of millions of people. To do so requires a revolution in the fullest sense of the word, the violent overthrow of one class by another. To do so requires the growth of revolutionary mass organizations and consistent development of our theory through practice. Marches every day and every week will not deliver the vengeance due this country. We don’t seek to send the killer cops to jail. Jail is too good for them. We make revolution to send them, their bosses, and their entire guilty system to the deepest and most tortuous pits of hell. This is not what democracy looks like. This is what a fascist police state looks like. Whose streets? Those who are willing to fight and die for them. The tactic of civil disobedience and taking dozens of arrests at a time is not an inherently revolutionary strategy. The police and other enemy forces know and expect and are used to it. Marching in a circle may give one the exuberance of being in a crowd, but it can not lead to revolution overnight. No more parades. We may have cost them money. They’ll make more. Windows may have been smashed. They have insurance. Organization and discipline and political education and arming of the people are the tasks of the movement now. Combatting liberalism, arrogance, egoism, selfishness, and incorrect political/organizational lines, practices, and strategies (buy black businesses, protest policing, the habit of chasing after the big “action”, the habit of attempting to “win over” or talk to the police”, failure to develop the leadership of the Black working class as actual and real leadership in the movement, lack of centralism and organizational accountability for organizing demonstrations and relying instead on a few so-called movement celebrities). Criticism and self-criticism on a principled basis and with real transformation afterwards is a necessity in any movement, and Saint Louis is no exception. History and the movement of revolutionary forces around the world shows us, we will win. And when we do, the names of our martyrs in Saint Louis and the entire country will be engraved in marble in what was once called Washington DC. The Saint Louis revolutionary movement calls on you to donate to the city’s NLG legal fund. We call on you to pay close attention to our city’s struggles. We call on you to make a million revolutions in the name of Anthony Lamar Smith, Isaiah Hammett, Mike Brown, and the countless victims of racist capitalist-imperialist violence in this country and this hemisphere since 1492. Let’s get it done.