Thousands upon thousands of martyrs have heroically laid down their lives for the people; let us hold their banner high and march ahead along the path crimson with their blood! – Mao Zedong
Edward Crawford, Jr. A working class, New Afrikan from Saint Louis. 27 years old. Father of four children. Outstanding leader of the people that came forward from the masses in the wake of the 2014 uprising in Ferguson. Found dead in his vehicle from a gunshot wound. The “investigating” pigs were quick to rush and attempt to sweep this case under the rug as a “suicide”, much like many others. But, the movement and the masses know better. The FBI tried to convince Martin Luther King, Jr. to commit suicide, because his anti-imperialist turn, criticisms of the capitalist-imperialist system, and opposition to the war in Vietnam so frightened them. They promoted sectarian, fratricidal violence in the Black Panther Party, leading to the deaths of many cadres and organizers. The police and their lackies will seek to wreck and ruin any genuine revolutionary movement in this country, and will not stop at murder. Our lives mean nothing to them. They are the unequivocal enemy of our people, 100%, full stop, no exceptions. None are good, if they were good, they would not be police. Darren Seals, another outstanding mass leader and activist that came forth from the Ferguson struggle, was found dead in similar circumstances, except in this case, he was shot and set on fire in his vehicle. Seals was the sixth person found murdered in this way in our area.
Tef Poe does not expect the Ferguson Police Department to properly investigate Seals’ death. He said the people of the St. Louis suburb “don’t have any misconceptions about what is going on.”
Carlos Ball, a close friend of Seals, agreed with Tef Poe’s belief that the Ferguson activist was executed and said, “the manner and the way in which he died” proves there was some foul play involved in his death.
“For him to be shot and then set on fire – that’s not random – that’s a targeted hit,” Ball said.
Ball went on to expound on how the community is reacting to the mysterious death of Seals and said, “Some activists are scared or have a little fear, but you have to when we know who we are going up against and what we’re going up against.
“We won’t be quiet about Darren’s death because Darren wouldn’t have been quiet had it been me, had it been Tef, had it been anybody else. Darren would have been vocal, been loud, and we got to do the same thing for him.”
It is well known that activists and revolutionaries from the working class of the oppressed nationalities are the greatest threat to the capitalist-imperialist, fascist style of governance in this country and in this world. In the Philippines and India, we see violence enacted by the state on oppressed peasants, workers, and mass organizers. People are routinely rounded up by death squads, military and the police (not necessarily separate organizations, mind you) and executed, or thrown in jail for no reason other than having attended a protest, or spoken out in public. In India, we see masses of oppressed indigenous people (called adivasis, or “tribals”) who have been struggling heroically against imperialist theft of their land and natural resources alongside the CPI (Maoist) labeled as “terrorists” and hounded, tortured, and murdered, particularly women. Essentially, wherever there is a revolutionary movement that poses a threat to the criminal order of things, we see the desperate acts of a dying class and regime. Organizers and revolutionaries, especially Maoists, from the New Afrikan and Chicano/Latinx nationalities are at special risk because of the revolutionary character of the working classes of these nations. Maoists of all nations are at risk because our ideology, which is the summation of centuries of proletarian struggle, is the grave digger of capitalism, imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism the world over. The American system is doomed, there is no salvation for it in the grand scheme of things. We are its gravediggers. The American regime does not want political development of the masses of the oppressed, it does not want a rapidly growing mass movement, it does not want more and more masses of our people acting upon the principle that political power does not grow out of a ballot box, but out of the barrel of a gun. It certainly doesn’t want Maoism to become a hegemonic force. Maoism recognizes that power never concedes to anything other than greater power, we are not ballot box “revolutionaries”, pray and play “revolutionaries”, NGO “revolutionaries”, or, to use Malcolm X’s term, “begolutionaries”. You can not offer a Maoist or any other real revolutionary who loves their people a billion dollars to do what is contrary to the wishes and desires of the masses of people, or to go against their interests. Yet, for all that it does not want, America truly has no power to stop it. It could not stop the resistance of the Vietnamese people to its war of aggression in their country. It has not stopped the people’s wars in the Philippines and in India, despite billions of dollars in aid and weapons that they have dumped there and the NGO lackies that they have sent. So, they engage in these desperate acts of a dying class. They promote reformist, sell-out elements such as DeRay McKesson as “leaders” of the struggle, despite him not having done anything concrete in Ferguson besides play on Twitter and boost his own platform. He gets to eat with Hillary Clinton and run for Mayor of Baltimore (and lose, the masses there don’t fuck with him either). Darren Seals and Edward Crawford get shot to death. Revolutionary women activists get hounded by the police. Revolutionary organizers are followed, hounded, tormented, and beaten, by both fascists and their pig friends. Yet, we continue. For each of us that falls, 100 more shall rise. No matter how much money they dump on the NAACP, on the McKessons and Jacksons and Sharptons to try to contain our rage, it will never work. We have no fear, we know that we will win, we know that America is doomed and our fallen comrades shall be avenged ten fold. There will be many more Fergusons. There will be Fergusons of a new type, beyond spontaneous and righteous rebellions of rage, there will inevitably exist a Marxist-Leninist Maoist party in this country that will wage a protracted people’s war that will make them long for the days when a molotov cocktail was all they had to fear. As long as there are people, there is power. As long as they keep doing these desperate acts, the people’s rage will grow. As long as we can’t breathe, our people will develop in tactics, strategy, and knowledge. They cannot kill us all. They can certainly kill themselves by continuing along this path, though. Solidarity and rage to the family of the fallen comrade, the comrade who stepped forth from the masses, threw their poisonous chemical weapon back at them, out of the way of children. Let us remember him and solidify our determination to develop further the revolutionary movement, grow new mass activists and revolutionary cadres, and uphold our end of the task to develop a Maoist party in the United States.
Saint Louis Revolutionary Collective 