Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid

Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution

In mobilizing the October 17 Harper’s Ferry march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid and to finish the job, two keys to revolutionary change stand out: revolutionary violence and multi-racial unity.

Revolutionary Violence

The government of a capitalist society enforces the exploitative and racist oppression of the working class by any means necessary, including violence by the cops at home and the military abroad. The capitalist state asserts a monopoly on the right to use violence, and uses it whenever workers and rebels threaten the bosses’ rule — on picket lines, in community rebellions against racism or in insurrections threatening bosses’ investments worldwide. The working class has no choice but to meet this capitalist violence with organized mass violence of its own. Failure to do so guarantees defeat.

Consider the Garrisonian abolitionists in the 1830s and ‘40s. They felt that with “moral suasion” slave-owners would eventually surrender their slaves. But “morality” will never trump the economic advantage of exploitation by elite classes, be they slaveholders or capitalists. The battle in Kansas (see CHALLENGE, 9/30) and the raid on Harper’s Ferry brought home that truth, and the ensuing Civil War demonstrated most certainly that only great violence could end the exploitation of chattel slavery.

Slavery was violence. The capture in Africa, the leg irons and imprisonment of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic on slave ships, the whip of the overseers to enforce interminable backbreaking work, and the master’s branding iron, jail cell and noose maintained slavery. The federal government guaranteed the legitimacy of this daily violence in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution and supporting laws, and used its armed might against both Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and the 1859 Harper’s Ferry Raid.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 restated the Constitution’s provision making it illegal to aid escaped slaves but now required citizens of Northern states to actively assist their recapture whenever asked by private slave-catchers and/or federal marshals. Refusing to help could mean six months in prison or a $1,000 fine, even if the person seized had never been a slave at all! No trial by jury was allowed in such cases, since Northern juries would not generally convict someone who opposed slavery. No supposedly escaped slave could ever testify.

The 1857 Dred Scott Decision deepened this tyranny. The Supreme Court ruled that no black person, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen and had no right to bring a case to court. This essentially legalized slavery nation-wide and officially endorsed racist doctrine.

Racist Laws Still Exist

Similar practices continue today! The U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staffs checkpoints on roads leading north from Mexico (sometimes hundreds of miles above the border), randomly stopping and searching vehicles, particularly those containing people who “look Latino.” Those who cannot prove their citizenship or produce documents showing they’re legally in the country are jailed and deported. ICE has employed similar tactics in raids on factories, movie theaters and wherever Latino workers are concentrated.

Similarly, the police beat and kill African American and Latino workers with impunity across the country.  No jury trial for them, just cops acting as judge, jury and executioner!  Killer cops are rarely indicted and virtually never convicted. Such state terrorism is designed to keep workers docile, divided and intimidated, echoing chattel slavery.

And so our class faces a violent, mighty foe. We must not shrink from what must be done today, organizing in factories, in the military and on campuses, not merely to resist but to turn the guns around on the world’s most violent ruling class. But such violence must be based in the masses.

Consider John Brown’s trip east after the January 1859 battle in Kansas. During this journey, his band of 15 helped 11 slaves escape and confronted and defeated 60 government soldiers trying to capture them. He fought and moved about with confidence since thousands of anti-slavery activists backed him wherever he went. In fact, when the Kansas governor demanded, via telegraph, that the U.S. Marshal at Springdale “capture John Brown, dead or alive,” the marshal responded with great irony, “If I try to capture John Brown, it’ll be dead, and I’ll be the one…dead!”

Similarly, Brown boldly declared that since President Buchanan had offered $250 for his capture, Brown would give $2.50 for the safe delivery of James Buchanan’s body.

A massive, militant anti-slavery movement existed, powerful enough to markedly limit federal government action. It had grown from the thousands who escaped from slavery and from their supporters. John Brown did not march on Harper’s Ferry to create a movement, but to put that movement on the offensive, just as he’d done in Kansas.

The Progressive Labor Party has mobilized against hundreds of demonstrations and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and Minutemen. Only the presence of hundreds of cops prevented the fascists from being torn apart by anti-racist fighters led by PLP. Similarly, it was only the power of the federal government to enforce laws that protected the slave-owners from being crushed by enslaved workers and their allies.

As the communist movement grows once again, we must prepare to defeat ruling-class violence with mass, working-class violence that sweeps away all capitalist institutions and bosses. Nothing short of this will enable us to rebuild a society based on equality, collectivity and sensible management of the planet’s resources for the needs of the working class, now and in the future. J

(Next issue: The Importance of
Multi-Racial Unity

Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World

On October 17, 2009, PLP’ers are joining many others at Harper’s Ferry to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Harper’s Ferry raid which sparked the Civil War that ended chattel slavery in the U.S.  Join us!

Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Osborne Anderson, John Brown, Harriet Tubman — these bold leaders of the anti-slavery struggle understood that the millions of enslaved Africans and millions more of the workers and small farmers oppressed by the slave oligarchy would, under the right conditions, rise up against slavery. They acted on this confidence in the masses and shook the world, from Charleston, S.C. and Southampton, Virginia, to bleeding Kansas and Harper’s Ferry. We should emulate this boldness in our struggles today, for the oppressed of the world will also, under the right conditions and communist leadership, rise up to destroy their exploiters.

Racist ideology intensified in the run-up to the Civil War as the rulers tried to ideologically undermine the anti-slavery cause. Blacks were portrayed by Southern slaveowners as an “inferior breed,” “happy” with slavery, and unfit because of their “inferiority” for a life of freedom alongside whites. Racists in the North repeated the picture of blacks as servile, shuffling, meek, cowardly and dancing in blissful ignorance.

These lies continue today in various forms and are applied to every ethnic group of workers to keep people divided and
demoralized. Left out of today’s picture is the
eleven-month Stella O’Doro strike in NY, the sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, the massive outpouring of opposition to the racist attacks on the Jena 6, black students who fought back against oppression in Louisiana, and hundreds more actions, large and small, around the world.

Anti-slavery rebels knew, contrary to the racist images, that enslaved and free blacks and anti-slavery whites planned and carried out ingenious and daring escapes from slavery with courage and fortitude in the face of whippings, jailing and death. Thousands of slaves escaped to the Dismal Swamp in Virginia, to the Florida swamps, and to the mountains of Jamaica to form egalitarian maroon societies in defiance of the slave system, defending their communities by any means necessary. Slaveowners and their racist apologists claimed that these fighters were the “lunatic fringe,” but John Brown and other anti-slavery activists knew better.

The slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 terrified slaveowners because it demonstrated that every enslaved person was a potential “assassin” of his “beloved” master.  Brown and other activists eagerly studied the formation of armies of thousands of the enslaved on the island of Santo Domingo and their success in annihilating their French masters in establishing a black Republic of Haiti in the 1790s.

These experiences led to two profound, if simple, conclusions: people fight back against oppression and their struggle causes change. These conclusions are often poorly understood.  Today, many workers say, “Nobody where I work wants to do anything” or “You can’t fight City Hall.” or “You can’t win.” Or “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But PLP knows better, and acts on the historical knowledge contained in those two simple conclusions.

While the anti-slavery movement grew apace, the European revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were sharpening the working-class fight against wage slavery. Based on their participation in the revolutionary movement and their study of history they developed the philosophy of dialectical materialism. This philosophy, outlined in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, proven true over the years, explains that class struggle is the motive force of history. Periods of seeming passivity among the oppressed, however prolonged, are replaced by blazing struggle, like the explosion of a seemingly dormant volcano. Systems of class exploitation, although they seem at times, permanent, and even “natural,” end. We are no longer cultivating crops and building pyramids in the Nile Valley. Slavery is ended. Feudalism has ended. Capitalism will also end.

Most people do not yet realize this, just as most people in 1859 did not yet realize that slavery was on the verge of extinction. The enslavement of Africans and the system built on this edifice had existed for over 200 years and appeared permanent, like capitalism today. But, with the growth of the PLP and a communist revolution in the face of imperialist war and the continuing crises of capitalism, communism will replace capitalism and all forms of class society.

Obama Echos Kennedy ‘Legacy’: War, Racism, Police State

Barack Obama hopes he can serve the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists as well as Ted Kennedy, whom he just eulogized as a national hero. The Kennedy Klan — John, Robert and Ted — helped mislead millions of workers into supporting profit-driven attacks on our own class, including genocidal wars. The Kennedys personify the lie that voting for liberal politicians is the answer to the miseries capitalism inflicts on workers, trying to divert them from militant struggle and a revolutionary outlook.

Liberals, like the Vietnam War-boosting Kennedys — now inflicting Obama’s murderous imperialist oil wars on masses of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — pay lip service to workers’ aspirations. They toss out a few crumbs that provide cover for the rulers’ anti-working class atrocities.

PLP Fought Kennedy Liberals’ Building of Racism as ‘Integration’

Only liberals like Kennedy could organize racism in the name of school desegregation. They pulled this off in Boston in the 1974-75 busing crisis. Kennedy protégé  Judge Arthur Garrity and liberal Mayor Kevin White ordered black children to schools in overwhelmingly white South Boston and Charlestown, where Navy shipyard closings had laid off thousands of mainly white, better-paid workers. The liberals wanted to divert these workers’ anger away from the rulers.

To ensure liberal leadership of a racist response, White had appointed James Kelly — leader of a rock-throwing, anti-busing racist gang deceptively called the South Boston Information Center — to an influential graft-ridden city post which dispensed the few jobs reemerging at the former Navy piers. This whole set-up virtually guaranteed a racist outbreak.

Kennedy often spoke in favor of the Garrity-White scheme, which in fact paved the way for budget cuts and furthered deterioration and segregation of Boston’s schools. This eventually led to the emergence of the Nazi group ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) which violently attacked black workers and students. Our Party, on the other hand, in our Boston Summer Project of 1975, attacked the Kennedy liberals and open racists alike, exposing their ties (see box).

More recently, Kennedy perpetuated liberal deception:

• After voting against the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq he voted for every war-funding bill ever since. His only objection was that the initial U.S. force was too small and needed more allies.

• Demanding immigration “reform,” Kennedy insisted on 13,000 more fascist inspectors and a shift from enforcement at borders over to worksites, leading to racist raids on immigrant workers. This enabled capitalists, using the threat of deportation, to increase exploitation at the actual point of production.

• Touting his (and John McCain’s) bill, Kennedy said, “employers will have generous access to the legal workers they need,” establishing a “guest worker” program that gives the bosses just enough exploited, low-wage workers to guarantee greater profits.

• Kennedy also co-sponsored the Dream Act whose promise of citizenship hides behind its real aim: a “national service” that puts millions of Latino youth who cannot afford college into the U.S. war machine.

• “Community policing,” another Kennedy pet project, has a friendly name but actually copies Nazi Germany’s networks of neighborhood informers. It uses black ministers and “community leaders” to terrorize black youth with the threat of jail, one minister declaring that “some kids need to go to jail… for their own sake.” (Harvard Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2000)

Kennedy’s character faults deserve mention only in that they highlight the gross inequalities of a class society and the decadence of the rulers and their privileged lackeys. His serial infidelity, substance abuse and arrogance — persistent family traits — hit a trifecta at Chappaquiddick in 1969. Mary Jo Kopechne, a young Kennedy staffer, drowned when a notoriously tipsy Kennedy drove his car off a bridge while “giving her a lift to the ferry.” For the crime, he won sympathy and re-election to the Senate. Workers do serious prison time for far less.

Add to that the cover-up by Kennedy and his cohorts of a family member’s rape of a woman on a Florida junket, a crime from which he was acquitted.

Obama, apparently more disciplined, currently leads the liberals’ bait-and-switch. His “anti-war,” “I’ll-fix-the-economy” platform gained him workers’ votes and the White House. Today Obama presides over one endless war in Iraq and another in Afghanistan that threatens to engulf nuclear Pakistan.

Meanwhile, worsening racist job and service cuts help fund the widening war effort, corporate profits and bankers’ bonuses. Obama’s pro-capitalist program, including his continuation of Kennedy’s crusade for wartime fascism through the afore-mentioned Dream Act, nationalization, and government control of healthcare in the name of “reform,” impels a working-class fight-back even more intense and broader than PLP’s Boston ’75.

As with the Kennedys and Roosevelt, Democratic officials vigorously spread Obama’s ideas through unions, on campuses, in churches and communities. Only by building a mass, revolutionary, communist PLP, drawing from participation in militant class struggles in these arenas, can we ultimately challenge the liberals’ deadly deceit and build a movement to destroy the capitalist hell these billionaires represent.

‘District 9’ Attacks Racist Apartheid But Offers No Solution

Sometimes in order to get a story about the horrors of racism and capitalism through the gauntlet of financiers and studio execs in Hollywood you have to add… ALIENS. In the movie District 9 an alien ship stops above Johannesburg, South Africa with nearly a million alien inhabitants in a state of starvation inside. Feeling pressure from the international community the South African government relocates the aliens to a camp on the edge of the city, District 9. The film takes place twenty years after the ship’s arrival. The film’s location in South Africa is no accident as it is meant to conjure images of the Apartheid system that ruled there for nearly fifty years.

District 9, like the areas most black South Africans’ lived in under apartheid, is a fenced-in slum with densely-packed shacks housing almost two million aliens living in a constant state of poverty and starvation. The aliens are blamed for the conditions of the slum they are forced to live in despite the fact that the conditions were created by denying them food and other resources. The local population, fully indoctrinated with this racism,
vigorously calls for the aliens to be removed to camps outside of the city.

The film is shot in a documentary-style fashion using commentary from people’s reactions to living in the city as the story unfurls. The comments about the aliens in the film are from real life interviews the director conducted with people from Johannesburg about the influx of immigrants mainly from Zimbabwe and Nigeria into the city.

The fighting between the humans and aliens reached the point where the government decides to relocate the aliens outside the city, District 10. They contracted out the removal of the aliens to a private enterprise called Multi-National United (MNU) that uses private and government security forces to control the aliens.

While most of the MNU and security forces are white it is interesting to see black members of the population in the crowd call for the alien deportations. Showing the negative results of life without communist politics, these black residents call for the removal of aliens to concentration camps not unlike those they were subjected to two decades prior under apartheid.

The class and race dimensions of the movie are made clear very early as the aliens’ “stupidity” is explained by academics and journalists who state that they must be the workers of the civilization since they are so loathsome. The workers at MNU regularly refer to the aliens as “prawns” which is the racist term devised for them. The aliens are given slave names like Christopher Johnson, names that with their vocal capabilities they can’t even pronounce; they are branded and rigorously catalogued.

The film’s human protagonist is the weak- minded Wikus who works in the alien and human affairs department of MNU. While engaging in a brutal forced eviction campaign in District 9 he meets an alien Christopher Johnson who questions the legality of the evictions, Wikus raids his house and exposes himself to alien technology that begins slowly turning him into a “prawn.” Representing the capitalist class as the human Wikus, his primary characteristics are cowardice and duplicity. He repeatedly makes his situation, and that of the aliens around him, worse by abandoning them in cowardly attempts to save himself. Only as he begins to fully change into an alien can he summon the courage to help the aliens in their fight against MNU.

MNU, who regularly brutalize the alien inhabitants and raid their homes looking for weapons, know of the Nigerians, gangsters living in the slums,  and their illegal activities, but allow them to exist as another method of terrorizing and controlling the population. Just like in the real world, gangsters only exist because of the racism and violence of capitalism and they flourish with the tacit consent of the capitalist class.

The contrast between the Nigerians and MNU in the film is interesting. The gangsters’ belief in witchcraft and their leader’s desire to consume alien flesh elicit an instant, strong response from the audience. “Who are these monsters?” one wonders. Yet when MNU agents engage in the regular policy of
dispatching alien babies with flame throwers (joking that they pop like popcorn), dissect mass numbers of aliens for medical experiments (in a crazed attempt to locate the source of their “power, á la the Nazis), or regularly gun down aliens in the street for fun it elicits a different response since they do it while wearing business suits or crisp white
uniforms. The film plays on how we have been taught to abhor the violence of petty gangsters while ignoring state-sanctioned genocide caused by the capitalist class.

By the end of the film you are ready to cheer as alien weaponry turns MNU agents and gangsters into clouds of red dust and goo. The film’s strong imagery leaves one feeling both disturbed and unsure about the future. There is no quick, easy victory. The film ends in a state of uncertainty and while the lesson is clear that demonization of the “other” caused by capitalist racism leads to genocidal violence, how do we escape this grim reality? There is one lesson that no Hollywood film is allowed to teach. If we want to end racism and the capitalist violence it excuses, then workers have to smash the whole system through communist revolution.

Four Years Post-Katrina: A Capitalist Disaster

Because of inherent racism, capitalism turned Hurricane Katrina into a destructive disaster for working people, a result which could have been prevented. Four years ago this coming August, Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, causing damage from central Florida to Texas and displacing over a million workers.

The majority of destruction was in New Orleans where 80% of the city was flooded and 1,836 workers’ lives were lost. The federal flood protection plan failed in 50 places and almost every levee was breached. Working-class people were stranded in flooded neighborhoods as the police and National Guard pulled guns on them, preventing them from entering the Superdome.

The areas in New Orleans affected the most and suffering the highest death rate were those in black and Latin communities. The local and federal governments did nothing to protect these communities, which were  poverty-stricken even before the hurricane.

The news media painted a racist and anti-working-class picture of the city’s residents. While levees were breaking and police were preventing residents from crossing bridges to non-flooded areas, the media focused on attacking people that were “looting” food from local grocery stores. People who had been stuck on roofs and in flooded areas had no other choice but to take food to survive.

The violence, which the media skewed, was mainly by cops and the National Guard against the people in the affected areas. The media, a ruling-class tool, is used to slander working people. However, from the beginning CHALLENGE exposed the bosses’ neglect of the working class and the media’s lies.

Today, we see little change in the politicians’ and government agencies’ response to problems stemming from Katrina. Of the 1,859 public housing apartments in the St. Bernard and Lafitte Housing developments, only 10 have been replaced. Only 11% of families have been able to return to the Lower 9th ward, one of the poorest and most devastated communities. There are 25% fewer hospitals in New Orleans than before Hurricane Katrina hit. Almost the entire school system, formerly public, has been privatized and has left teachers without a union.

FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was scheduled to give $2.6 billion to the state of Louisiana and $1.9 billion to New Orleans, neither of which has been delivered (San Francisco Bay View, 11/09/08). But the government has no problem spending $750 billion dollars to bail out U.S bankers.

On June 1, FEMA was set to evict thousands of residents from their FEMA trailer homes, but after militant protests, the government was forced to sell the trailers to the residents for $1. Here, four years after the hurricane, workers are still living in trailers, many of which were poisoned with toxins and poor construction, sickening many people.

The rulers have used this disaster to gentrify New Orleans and profit off the reconstruction in the tourist and rich neighborhoods. Undocumented workers have been hired at poverty wages, sometimes going unpaid, to work in unsafe conditions to rebuild the city. What was a disaster for the people of New Orleans has been turned into a gold mine for the ruling class.

Cuba has created a hurricane emergency system which, even as a remnant of the system that existed before Cuba gave up on fighting for the interests of the working class, has consistently kept death tolls to a minimum during hurricane season.  Cuba assigns people to distribute medication to those in need and prepare food for times of natural disaster so people won’t have to “loot.”

PLP has gone to New Orleans every year to stand with our working-class brothers and sisters to help rebuild homes and work with groups to spread revolutionary ideas. A communist society will plan in advance how to handle natural disasters, which will minimize loss of life and provide food, clothing and housing to those who may suffer losses.

That’s why we need to build a society that values workers above all, abolishes profits and destroys racism. Join the struggle to fight for communism!

Black Youths Jailed; Real Criminals Go Scot-free

February — Two 16-year-old youths have been incarcerated for several months now by the criminal IN-justice system. They are being charged as adults for “aggravated assault” and denied bail! According to allegations, the young men used a knife to demand money from someone on the street.

At the time of the arrest they were separated and forcefully interrogated for hours. The police told the youths that if they did not “confess” to more crimes, their pictures would be shown to any number of random victims who could be convinced to “identify” them as perpetrators. The racist cops told the youths that this would be easy to accomplish simply because they are black. About 70% of the U.S prison population is black and Latino. While blacks and Latinos comprise only 25% of the U.S. population, nearly triple that percent are in prison.

The official police report does tell the truth about one thing. It states that the youths said they were hungry. Viewing that issue more broadly, every day over 30 million people go to bed hungry in the U.S., including 46% of all black children, 40% of Latino children and 16% of white children. The cause of this hunger is the international system of capitalism – U.S. imperialism in particular – which has also killed over 650,000 Iraqis in the last four years, and well over 1.2 million since 1992. Globally, more than 850 million people live on less than one dollar a day – the international poverty line set by the World Bank – and half the world’s population lives on less than $2-a-day! Over 250,000 children die every week of hunger and malnutrition. The vast majorities are black, Latin and Asian.

Why aren’t the criminals responsible for this in jail? For one, what they call democracy is really a dictatorship of the business owners, of the capitalist class. They control the power of the state, — courts, cops, government, schools, and military — that they use it to violently maintain power. Two, there is not yet a mass revolutionary communist movement to overthrow this system.

Members of PLP are active in the defense and support of these two teens. The support group is having regular meetings and has divided up tasks, like organizing a schedule for visits to see the youths in jail, raising money to put into the jail commissary accounts (so the two teens have access to basics like writing paper and stamps), meeting with the defense lawyers, and generating publicity about the case.

The jails will be filled with the capitalists only when we make a communist revolution, put an end to the whole profit system, and struggle successfully to completely defeat the legacy of racism. For now, as the system drives our class further into misery, PL does not condone anti-working class actions. It is wrong to forcefully take something from another member of our class. Even more importantly, however, we must point out that the main criminals are not youths who may sometimes make a bad decision, but the system itself which ravages our lives much more deeply.

Our alternative is to bring communist ideas to workers, youth, and soldiers. We must organize to smash capitalism, the root of our class problems. An important first step is to bring a sizable contingent to our May Day activities, where everyone can be inspired by a glimmer of the positive, communist future ahead. J

Rebellion, Not Non-Violence, Is Black Workers’ Real History

As the U.S. government celebrates black history month this February, the bosses’ media are painting Barack Obama’s presidency as the positive legacy of a pacifist civil rights movement. But the real history of the civil rights era is militant black workers rebelling, often violently, against racism.

This is the history of the international working class that the Progressive Labor Party celebrates every day in our fight to smash capitalism — the system that gave birth to racism and continues to profit from it.

The many gains of the civil rights era — the end of legal race segregation, free breakfast programs, jobs for blacks, affirmative action — were concessions won by militant, mass working-class struggle. The civil rights movement involved thousands of black workers heroically putting their lives on the line. Many, many were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and throughout the South in the fight against racism. While the movement also involved whites, including some who died, the opening of freedom schools, marching against segregation, integrating lunch counters and other struggles brought the full force of the racist system down on those black workers who stood up and fought.

Obama is part of King’s legacy of misleading working-class anti-racists into the dead end of supporting the bosses’ politicians and laws. There was tremendous political struggle within the anti-racist movement in the 1960’s. At the famous 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom where King gave his “I have a dream” speech, King and other march organizers toned down a student’s speech attacking Kennedy, the Democrats, and the Civil Rights bill itself for failing to address police brutality, racist unemployment, and low wages.

This militancy wasn’t only, or even mainly, inside the organized movement. In 1965, police harassment of a black man sparked an anti-racist rebellion in Watts, California. King went to Watts and supported the armed cops and National Guard troops, while urging rebels to be peaceful. When his pacifism was rejected, King phoned President Lyndon Johnson (who had sent him to Watts) complaining about “all of these tones of violence from people out there in the Watts” (New York Times, 05/14/02). King’s last campaign to support 1,200 striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in the spring of 1968 is supposedly his most radical. But King fled the March 28th protest when a group of demonstrators, frustrated with pacifist leadership, smashed downtown store windows.

Black Workers’ Armed Struggle

Black workers’ militant and sometimes armed struggle won the victories that are credited to King. In 1964, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense emerged as an armed organization to defend non-violent civil rights workers and spread to 23 communities across the south. Their actions helped win integration battles and fight off racist terror from the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and racist white mobs (“The Deacons for Defense,” Lance Hill, 2004).

Then, in June 1964, the first mass big-city rebellion erupted in New York City’s Harlem when masses of black workers and youth took to the streets to protest a police murder of a black teenager. They marched through Harlem’s streets, displaying the front page of CHALLENGE as their “flag.” PLM (Progressive Labor Movement, forerunner of PLP) was the only organization to support the rebellion — all the reformist black leaders and the “Communist Party” tried to cool the rebels and attacked PLM. The latter was barred from Harlem but defied the ban and held a mass demonstration, which sent several in PLM to jail. This rebellion laid the basis for many to follow, including in Newark, NJ in 1967.

The Detroit rebellion of 1967 — sparked by police harassment of a party for returning black Vietnam veterans and suppressed by 82nd Airborne troops diverted from Vietnam — led directly to 10,000 jobs in the auto industry for black workers.
When King was assassinated in 1968, anti-racist rebellions flared up in hundreds of U.S. cities. These rebellions led to an increase in jobs for blacks, especially in the public sector, although unemployment and underemployment remained (and remains) higher for black workers than for white.

Black Politicians Have Never Served the Working Class

The U.S. bosses want us to focus on political victories for black politicians (like Obama) but these black bosses are part of the same racist ruling class that is responsible for the reversal of the civil rights gains and the racist conditions today.

Despite decades of black, Latino, and Native American mayors, governors and lawmakers, racism thrives by every indicator — higher incarceration rates, lower wages, more unemployment, higher home foreclosure rates, less access to health care and fewer education opportunities for black, Latino and Native American workers. Over and over cops get away with racist terror — such as the murders of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California and Sean Bell in Queens, New York — while Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton urge us to be peaceful and seek victory in courts that acquit or slap cops on the wrist.

Like King, Obama can only offer empty hope and promises. His role is to win anti-racists to support the racist ruling class.
In referring to the “muslim world” as a “clenched fist” Obama uses anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism to win U.S. workers to support oil wars in Afghanistan and continued occupation in Iraq, which have killed over one million Iraqis since 2003. (Opinion Research Business, Feb 2008). Obama constantly draws inspiration from racist slave-owning founding fathers who systematically committed genocide against Native Americans to increase their profits.

Obama will not wage the battle against racism. So, just as workers in the ‘60s did not rely on a servant of the ruling class to wage their battles, we can’t rely on the current servant to wage ours.

The gains won by our class in the ‘60s have been reversed. Those good-paying auto industry jobs won by black workers in Detroit have vanished. The mass anti-racist rebellions were good, but the crumbs given our class in response have been taken back. The fight against racism must take place within the context of fighting for communist revolution, the only outcome where workers can win power and establish a world free of capitalism and its racism.

RACIST MURDER SPARKS OAKLAND REBELLION

OAKLAND, CA, January 12 — On January 1, Oscar Grant, an unarmed 22-year-old black man, was murdered by a racist BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cop. Grant cried to the cop, “Don’t shoot me! I have a four-year-old daughter!” whereupon the cop shot him in the back while he lay on the ground, sparking hundreds of youth to rebel.  This state-sponsored execution-style murder is one of the latest examples of “business-as-usual” under the racist capitalist system.

On January 7, workers and youth held a protest rally at BART where the murder occurred. As anger grew, up to 500 people eventually marched from that BART station to downtown Oakland where a rebellion occurred. Youth attacked police vehicles and businesses along the route.

The murdering BART cop is part of a force for which Homeland Security allotted millions of dollars specifically to transit police in the rulers’ “war on terror,” now being turned into a racist war against black and Latino youth.
Many of the young people who marched for immigrant rights on May Day last year were present. The united anger of young people from all backgrounds was inspiring. Some held signs with Oscar Grant’s picture, linking his murder to the massacre in Gaza as the latest examples of state-sponsored terror. When Oakland’s black mayor Ron Dellums showed up, he was booed. When he pleaded for “calm” later at the rebellion, he was ignored. PLP’ers brought our class analysis and internationalism to the protest and distributed CHALLENGES.

The rally’s open mike heard most speakers call for a calm protest, requesting a “police oversight commission.” But angry youth called for action. One youth declared, “This isn’t just a black thing, all of Oakland needs to unite and do something about it.”  Another young man said he “would personally organize a riot if the cop wasn’t convicted.” Thuyen Tran, 24, of Vietnamese descent, despite the damage to his family’s business, said he understood the protesters’ anger: “It doesn’t make sense,  using brutal force. It doesn’t feel good because No.1, I’m a minority, and No 2, I’m a young kid.” (NY Times, 1/8/09)

All these comments contained the seed of a class analysis about the difference between state-sponsored, institutional violence from the police and violence among youth due to being saturated with divisive capitalist ideas. They present an opportunity for PLP’ers to raise with co-workers and friends that pacifism towards the police won’t stop cops’ violence (nor gang violence). Only developing class consciousness among young working-class people will do that, understanding that they are all in the same boat, and have a common, often violent, class enemy that controls the government and uses the police to repress workers’ opposition to ruling-class oppression.

Whether through unemployment or underserved schools and resources, capitalism has always marginalized black and Latino youth. The large, militant response to this murder shows that these youth are a potential force for rebellion. However, they need to see the connection to the overall capitalist system, which depends on racist super-exploitation for super-profits.

It is precisely these angry youth who the ruling class wants Obama to divert away from rebellion against racist oppression into patriotic “national service” to fight in U.S. imperialist wars. (See editorial front page.)
As the bosses’ economic crisis deepens, continued attacks here and abroad will intensify. The current massacre in Gaza reflects what this system has in store for the working class worldwide.

This protest showed the need for communist leadership to develop this kind of analysis among these youth. We must step up our participation in the community organizations in and around Oakland and build our influence on our jobs, in our unions and in the schools and not be caught off guard. Calling for strikes on the job against these police-state murders is more relevant in light of this rebellion.

Just as we saw in Greece, where the working class was already in motion against austerity measures and was inspired by the action of young people, this rebellion here shows that the working class is smoldering and impatient, that working-class-wide unity is possible.

The door is wide open in these events when we go with our friends and co-workers. Oscar Grant’s murder has outraged vast numbers worldwide who know the intimate details from the internet. To go from outrage and rebellion to class-conscious, planned, working-class-led revolution is a long process. It requires a communist party — PLP — active among workers and youth to lead to this goal.

Racist Lynching Must Be Punished!

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD, December 22 — The People’s Coalition for Police Accountability, joined by CASA de Maryland and other community organizations rallied today at the Upper Marlboro Courthouse. The rally demanded that the State’s Attorney (the county prosecutor) Glenn Ivey indict the prison guards who, without a doubt, strangled Ronnie White in his jail cell. The medical examiner’s final report determined that he was, in fact, murdered in his cell.

The lynching of this 19-year-old black man must not go unpunished! Capitalism maintains extreme racism to keep the working class intimidated and divided, so there’s no surprise that Ivey dismissed the grand jury investigating this case, without an indictment. Under capitalism, there’s no justice in cases like Ronnie White’s. Only a revolution for communism will end racism and the ruling class’s attacks on the working class.

Anti-racist organizers leafleted hundreds of people at Metro stations and at the courthouse. White’s family stepped forward boldly to attack the media’s demonization of Ronnie. Tens of thousands of people in the Washington, D.C. area saw TV and journal news reports about the rally. The bold, loud demonstration at the courthouse made it impossible for Ivey to ignore it. He felt compelled to speak to the press and continue his lie that he was still investigating the case and just had “a few loose ends” to finish up! He spent an hour with a protest delegation trying to sweet-talk his way out of trouble. We will never let him make this lynching a “cold case”!

Mobilizing workers around the racist brutality of the law enforcement system is the order of the day. We must attack the “blue wall of silence,” the culture of racist police violence and the cops’ and guards’ ability to kill with impunity. As capitalism’s current international financial crisis intensifies, the bosses will use the full extent of their state power to terrorize workers even more.

We in PLP must bring our communist politics to the struggle against the racist brutality of the bosses’ goons (cops, guards, etc.), showing that only a society without bosses — communism — is the long-range end to this horror. CHALLENGE must become our ideological weapon in this vital task.

NATIONAL SERVICE: OBAMA’S SCHEME TO DRAFT YOUTH FOR BOSSES’ WARS

Last June at Columbia University, President-Elect Barack Obama said  that he would make plans for the American people to recognize an “obligation” for military service. “If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some.” The ruling class has never forgiven the Bush administration’s failure to successfully use the 9/11 attacks to recruit more young workers, especially black and Latin, to be patriotic Americans willing to fight in its military.

The Obama administration has promised not to make the same mistake. With wars in Afghanistan and Iraq burning, the economic meltdown and rising unemployment and the rise of new imperialist rivals, time is running out for the U.S. ruling class to try to maintain its position as top imperialist power. As future White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel has stated: “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste . . . They are opportunities to do big things.” (Boston Globe, 11.30.08)

One “big thing” they’re attempting is to recruit young workers and students to National Service. This includes plans to expand AmeriCorps to 250,000 and double the size of the Peace Corps. These programs under the guise of promoting community service domestically and internationally have been used as a way to stop rebellions and support U.S. imperialist attacks on workers around the world.

They are also proposing that all middle and high school students do at least 50 hours of community service a year, giving a tax incentive of up $4,000 a year in “exchange for 100 hours of public service.” College students would do 100 hours of public service in exchange for tuition decreases,  making “a college education affordable.” (Obama’s website).

This service would help meet dire needs of the ruling class:
In order to rebuild a rapidly disintegrating infrastructure, it will create low-wage jobs –– many of them non-union –– thereby lowering the wages of the entire working class

1. More bodies in military uniform. (See CHALLENGE, 12/10)
2. Win workers and youth to U.S. nationalism
3. Clean up the image of the U.S. around the world as the country that spreads “democracy.”

RULERS TURN WORKERS’ COLLECTIVITY ON ITS HEAD FOR THEIR NEEDS

In the absence of a mass communist movement capable of winning thousands of workers to revolutionary ideas, the bosses can twist working-class collectivity into support for capitalism. Many people volunteered during events like 9/11, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, proving that workers have a willingness to help others and oppose, at some level, the “everyone-for-themselves” mentality of capitalism. A 2006 UCLA study found that 86% of incoming college freshmen — most of whom are now presumably college juniors thinking about post-college employment –– volunteered at least occasionally during high school and 70% did so at least once a week (Washington Post, 11/24/08). The communist PLP aims to take this collective feeling and use it as part of organizing a society based on production for the good of the whole of society.

On the other hand, the bosses’ intentions with community and national service is similar to the Nazis’ call for National Socialism by recruiting young and old to “do what they can” for the sake of the country (i.e., the ruling class). The Obama administration wants to acclimate the U.S. population to the idea of “service” and “sacrifice.” These ideas will be used to convince workers and students to make the deadly error of allying with their class enemies and fighting for U.S. imperialism.

Work Within, Not on the Outside

We can turn Obama and the Democrats’ idea of community and national service on its head by buildng communist ideas within their various “Corps.” That means distributing CHALLENGE and always fighting for service for the working class — organizing against the bosses and for the real interests of the workers. We need to fight against workers getting laid off from their jobs, getting their pensions and homes ripped away from them by the greed of capitalism. We need to fight every attack against immigrant workers, like the murder of Marcelo Lucero in Long Island, by capitalist-inspired racism. We need to fight for communism to get rid of racism, sexism, nationalism and imperialist war. These are our working-class’ calls to service.

The mass unemployment hitting the U.S. and the world will draw many workers to the option of national service. Sooner rather than later this option will become mandatory as inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens and the eventuality of war is clearer. Members and friends of the communist Progressive Labor Party must organize with workers to build class struggle against the bosses — taking the lead in strikes, marches and rallies. We need to build a base of rank-and-file workers to recruit for communist revolution.