A Word on the Maoist Approach to “Community Policing”

Community policing in the liberal lexicon is an opportunist and harmful strategy which seeks to prop up the indefensible invasion of New Afrikan communities through sensitivity training and more black faces in high places. Some approaches even have the police directly interacting with children and elders through distortions of community service programs and mass outreach approaches so that in many urban neighborhoods it is possible to see pigs playing basketball with neighborhood children, handing out supplies for schoolchildren, cooking at barbecues, and generally trying to win over the people through the carrot approach while they still wear the “stick” on their side. This approach is supported by reactionary sellout clergy, opportunist ward heeling aldermen, and “activists” seeking to trade social capital for foundation money or electoral opportunities. It is the duty of Maoist revolutionaries to firmly and thoroughly oppose these strategies and be upfront about our intent to drive the bourgeois state apparatus from our neighborhoods. This includes the police, the politicians, and all who are opposed to the development of Communist power in the hood because of their class position which is antagonistic to the development of our power and our sinking deep roots into the masses.

Community policing in a Maoist sense means that the masses, under the direction and guidance of the Party or those who are actively developing the foundations for a Party, police and direct affairs in their own neighborhood. Once the State abdicates control of territory and the new power is being developed, new Communist organs of power (people’s committees, people’s militias, and other things of that type) must be developed and propagated to organize defense, production, distribution, education, and other such things. After the pigs have been expelled from an area, they will seek to weasel their way back in or punish the masses by cutting off vital resources such as medical treatment, water, electricity, and other things of that nature. There will also be attempts at military encirclement to prevent the expansion of the base area, much like the situation in the areas controlled by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s.

It is the business of the Party working in close concert with mass organizations to remedy this situation and develop military power along with productive capacity to serve the people and develop people’s state power in the red bases. People will need to eat, diabetics will need electricity to store insulin, clothes will have to be produced, children will need to be educated. It’s easy enough to seize territory, administrating it, developing it, and most importantly defending it requires all hands available. Spies and wreckers will need to be rooted out, again, necessitating the development and arming of the masses and their education and mobilization against these destabilization efforts. To repress people’s movements the reactionary State will go all out to starve the people to death, attempt to prove the party “incompetent” and erode confidence in the ability to manage affairs, and deprive the party of its mass base by forced migration and or outright massacre. All of these approaches have been used against Maoists in India and the Philippines, and it is a testament to the correct political lines of these Parties and their masterful application of Maoism to their concrete conditions that they have managed to survive and expand in the light of such attempts. A Maoist party making revolution in the United States or any other imperialist metropole will need to thoroughly master practical and political work along with legal and illegal forms of struggle to ensure that it is not crushed in the cradle. Mainly it will be of utmost important to develop, fund, and expand organs of power that are capable of combatting subversion attempts, destabilization, and struggling against reactionaries, demoralizers, and other things of that nature. Failure to develop organs of community policing and community education will result in the subversion of base areas and the eradication of Party cadre and mass organizers.

Primarily the Maoist approach to community policing right now should include training of trusted mass contacts in various forms of not only combat but also in the production and preservation of food, medical treatment, and security culture. Training in recognizing common fascist symbols and ways in which the police have subverted and destroyed movements in the past should also be included, along with the drawing on the skills of community in skilled trades such as plumbing, carpentry, masonry, and electrician work. This is in preparation for the inevitable disruption of services in the event of a revolutionary situation and the need to compensate for the cessation of these State provided services as punishment. It will be necessary to demonstrate and test the integrity and ability of these apparatuses along with boosting morale and demonstrating the virtues of people’s power and direct action over reliance on State approved apparatuses by consistently and constantly promoting direct confrontation of abusive landlords and storeowners and taking matters into our own hands to feed, clothe, develop and train our communities. Reactionary attempts to co-opt our apparatuses should be rejected and the masses should be educated through political education and practice of the results of allowing infiltration and disruption of their organs of power. To sum up, our work in the community and our work among the masses is not just about “feeding people” in the manner of a bourgeois charity. It is about laying the foundations of a new state and a new order, a socialist one. This is something that must consistently be kept at the forefront of our minds. Politics in command means that we can’t just focus on the economic aspects of our work, without correct politics our work won’t have any soul and will be ripe for integration into or destruction by that which we ourselves seek to destroy.