Statement on Kyle Rittenhouse
Cincinnati Socialists condemn the exoneration of murderer and terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse. We stand together with the people of Kenosha and appeal to our friends and comrades in the broad US Left to rise above sectarianism and dogmatism and organize for the liberation of the working class and all oppressed people.
We say emphatically that Kyle Rittenhouse is a fascist. We also insist that fascism is the inevitable product of capitalism in terminal decay, and that the capitalist state will and can never protect us or fight for justice on our behalf. Furthermore, the court system—through its circus-display of buffoonery—has once again revealed itself as an institution that will protect, embolden, and encourage these so-called "heroes" and "vigilantes" to uphold a white supremacist agenda. From the Greensboro Massacre to police collaboration with neo-Nazis in 2016, Rittenhouse’s acquittal follows a well-established precedent of state-sanctioned violence and represents the maintenance of the United States’ white supremacist bourgeois legal system. An institution with slavery and genocide woven into its fabric cannot serve justice in any capacity. Until we confront and dismantle these systems, Rittenhouse will just be one of many individuals permitted to murder in the name of racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
The violence committed by Rittenhouse must be understood within the broader context of the violent inception of the United States—as a process of right-wing, counter-revolutionary violence against Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, and the working class, perpetrated in order to maintain white supremacy and the hegemony of the ruling class. As George Jackson writes, “Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.” The same institution that acquitted Rittenhouse is responsible for the mass incarceration and enslavement of Black people, the displacement of Indigenous people, and the dispossession of those who reside in the Global South; the imbrication of the struggles for liberation necessitates revolutionary armed struggle and the dismantling of white supremacy and capitalism.
We urge all partisans of human liberation to join a Marxist or socialist organization, because history shows that only the people—not the capitalist state—can fight effectively against oppression in all its forms. We have no faith whatsoever in capitalist courts, legislatures, or police. We have no trust in the capitalist class or its defenders in the media or the academy.
Now is the time for a massive and public show of solidarity with people of color, queer people, immigrants, Indigenous and other oppressed people. Now is the time to say with one voice that that we not only reject the racist and xenophobic principles Kyle Rittenhouse stands for, but we reject a legal system that puts private property and the tranquility of the ruling class before the basic rights of working and colonized people to defend themselves, to struggle for political change, and to assemble safely for these purposes in public.