The racist police murders of Pedro Villanueva, Delrawn Small, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile—on four consecutive days in July—are not isolated incidents or the work of a few “bad cops.” They are all too typical atrocities that expose the true face of capitalism. And they show the working class a glimpse of the heightened racist violence and bigger imperialist wars coming our way.
Capitalism cannot be reformed, nor can it be stopped by a lone wolf sniper firing into a crowd. The Progressive Labor Party fights to eliminate cops and imperialism for all time by destroying capitalism with mass revolutionary violence—with communist revolution.
The road to revolution is long and challenging. But the militant response to the latest wave of killings by cops, in demonstrations from Britain and Canada to New York and Los Angeles, shows that the capitalists haven’t terrorized the international working class into submission. In the German capital of Berlin, more than 120 police were injured in what authorities called “the most aggressive and violent protests in the last five years” (cbsnews.com, 7/10). Workers around the world are once again inspiring millions by fighting back!
Workers’ Response to KKKop Terror: Fight Back!
On Saturday, July 9, 50 members of the Progressive Labor Party led a march from the intersection of Church and Nostrand Avenues in Flatbush, a Black working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn (see photo). PLP has had a presence here for three decades. With chants of “Shut this racist system down!” and “Asian, Latin, Black and white, workers of the world unite,” the multiracial group of communists and friends shut down traffic and marched through an annual street fair on Flatbush Avenue.
Along the way, Black workers raised fists and chanted with us; 50 workers joined the march at various points. PL’ers sold 500 CHALLENGEs and distributed 1,000 leaflets calling for fightback against racist police terror with communist revolution. Even after we ran out of literature halfway through the march, workers continued to approach us to exchange contact information and find out more about us.
Taking the Streets of Manhattan
On Thursday, July 7, thousands of multiracial workers and youth angrily marched out of Union Square at a Black Lives Matter-led rally and took the streets of Manhattan. Chanting “Shut it down!”, they blocked busy streets and snarled miles of traffic. PL’ers sold hundreds of CHALLENGEs and led revolutionary chants, as hundreds of youth pounded on car windows and frustrated cops’ attempts to direct and control the demonstrators.
Workers’ Anger Turning Up Against Killer NYPD KKKop
On July 4, an off-duty New York Police Department officer murdered 37 year-old Black man Delrawn Small at a Brooklyn traffic stop. Videos taken by bystanders show the unarmed Delrawn approaching the vehicle and being immediately shot in the head and chest, contradicting the cop’s claim that Delrawn punched him in the face through the car window. Delrawn’s girlfriend and two children witnessed the cold-blooded killing.
On July 5, dozens of community and family members rallied at the intersection where he was killed. After a pacifying lecture by liberal Black misleader Charles Barron, a New York State assemblyman, the workers and youth heard a militant and heartfelt speech from Small’s brother. Then the crowd—including a multiracial PLP group—took the street in a rally originally organized by Barron with the NYPD’s blessing. But the event soon spun out of this class traitor’s control, as Black and Latin workers and youth aimed their anger at the cops gathered around them. Barron appealed for calm and blamed the protesters for “having their own agenda.” One PL’er called out to Barron, “What about YOUR agenda?”, prompting some laughter from the Smalls family.
Liberal politicians like Barron are wolves in sheep’s clothing. The bosses use them to calm workers’ justified rage and channel it into the bosses’ electoral circus. PL’ers sold CHALLENGEs, made contact with members of the Small family, and have followed up with home visits. Our aim is to unmask the danger posed by liberal snakes like Barron, and to build a mass anti-racist movement against these killer police.
Bosses Need Racist Police Terror
From the U.S. and Mexico to Russia and China, the role of law enforcement in all capitalist countries is to protect private property and suppress the one force that can bring this racist system down: the working class. Meanwhile, the job of the rulers’ politicians is to deceive us with the patently false idea that workers and the bosses’ cops are on the same side and want the same things. President Barack Obama made this message clear at the memorial for the five cops killed in Dallas, Texas: “I see what’s possible when we recognize that we are one American family, all deserving of equal treatment.” The apologist-in-chief skirted the fact that equal treatment is a fantasy in a capitalist country founded in genocide, built by slave labor, and sustained by racist inequalities in every aspect of life.
The misleaders who push identity politics and Black nationalist ideology divide us by misdirecting the blame for racism on white workers. The true problem of the international working class is capitalism, a system organized to generate profits for the few at the expense of the needs of the masses. Capitalism creates the divisive ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism. Capitalism feeds on super-profits from its super-exploitation of Black, Latin, immigrant and women workers. Capitalism leads inevitably to imperialist war, as rival national ruling classes compete for global control over resources, markets and cheaper labor.
Modern U.S. police departments evolved out of early U.S. history, when wealthy landowners funded groups of fugitive slave-catchers. Later, these “law enforcement” officers collaborated with Ku Klux Klan chapters in terrorizing Black worker and keeping them divided from their white and immigrant working-class sisters and brothers through the corrosive pathology of racism.
But the bosses are confronted with a huge contradiction. On the one hand, they need racist police terror to keep the masses in check; on the other, they need these same Black and Latin youth to fight in their unending imperialist wars. While liberals like Obama push all-class unity (a hallmark of rising fascism) and try to limit police violence, gutter racists continue to murder our sisters and brothers in the street.
The bosses can never resolve their contradiction. The job of communists and friends of PLP is to sharpen the contradiction—and ultimately to smash the bosses—by winning workers to fight back in multiracial unity.
Racism, Nationalism Justify Imperialist Wars
Racist state terror in the U.S. can only intensify as the U.S. capitalist class drives toward wider imperialist wars with their Russian and Chinese imperialist rivals. The U.S. and Chinese bosses are in stiff competition over control of the South China Sea and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as economic supremacy in Latin America.
U.S. and Russian imperialists—along with their respective proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran—are vying for control over the oil-rich Middle East and strategically vital Central Asia. With each step closer to a global war, the bosses need more intensive racism—against Muslims and immigrants as well as Black and Latin workers—to divide and intimidate the working class, and to justify mass imperialist slaughter.
Revolution, Not Fake “Solutions”
According to the Mapping Police Violence project, U.S. cops killed at least 346 Black people in 2015—nearly one per day. Black people are more than three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and Black victims are more than 50 percent more likely to be unarmed. Of the 102 cases (and probably more) where unarmed Black people were killed by cops in 2015, only ten resulted in an officer being charged with a crime. Only two cases resulted in cops being convicted, and only one led to a cop serving significant jail time.
Systemic racism is evident in both the statistics and the nature of these murders. On July 3, for just one example, nineteen-year-old Pedro Villanueva was wantonly gunned down in his pickup truck after a high-speed chase by highway patrolmen in an unmarked car in Fullerton, California. Villanueva’s alleged crime: showing off his driving skills in a parking lot “sideshow” (Los Angeles Times, 7/5). “Friends of Villanueva questioned the officers’ decision to follow the teenager with an unmarked car, contending that he may not have known he was being pursued by police, but rather feared he was being robbed on the dead-end street” (L.A. Times, 7/6).
These recent racist killings expose the futility and emptiness of reform measures—body cameras, “community policing,” sensitivity training and the rest. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was murdered as the pigs pinned him to the ground, the police department claims that both of the kkkops’ mandated body cameras had coincidentally “fallen off.”
Nor does it do the working class any good to have more police look like their victims. Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who murdered Philando Castile at a suburban Minneapolis traffic stop, is Latin. Three of the kkkops who faced criminal charges for killing Freddie Gray in Baltimore were Black. Twenty of the 68 police chiefs in the Major Cities Chiefs Association are Black (New York Times, 7/11), yet modern-day lynchings by cops continue unabated. A “diversified” police force is still a racist police force.
PLP: For Mass Revolutionary Violence
When 25-year old former Army Reservist Micah Johnson killed five cops at the Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas, he made the work of anti-racists and revolutionaries that much harder. Apparently set off by by the racist police killings of Sterling and Castile, Johnson retreated into individualism and adventurism when he shot the police. In the end, he was murdered by a police drone on wheels—executed without a trial, like so many Black workers in the U.S.
Johnson was reportedly a former member of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), a fringe group that represents nationalism at its worst. Preying on Black workers’ frustration, the group’s leaders target white workers, and Jewish workers in particular, with vile and open racism. Johnson’ outlook was no doubt formed by capitalism’s daily racism, by the trauma of serving in the rulers’ imperialist war in Afghanistan, and by the toxic ideology of the likes of the NBPP. He was driven to mental illness and suicide-by-cop. To the extent that nationalist groups succeed in dividing our class, they help only the bosses. They are a reactionary, anti-revolutionary element
PLP organizes within the bosses’ military to build a mass movement for communism to seize state power and smash the dictatorship of the capitalists. Our strategy means struggling with masses of workers in the military to fight for our international class and turn the guns around—to turn imperialist war into class war for revolution.
Build A Fighting PLP!
Workers are fighting back, and our Party is in the thick of the struggle. Workers rebelled after the July 5 police murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. As we go to press, women-led PLP fighters are marching alongside rebelling workers there (see page ?).
On Sunday, July 10, the day the NYPD shot and injured yet another Black man in Flatbush, Paul Mathurin, Black, white and Latin PL’ers talked with community members, sold CHALLENGEs and made contacts. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Mathurin and refused to believe the bosses’ lies that he was waving a gun. The struggle to unite our class advances every day.
The worldwide working class, led by Progressive Labor Party, must persevere to build a mass, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement. We must struggle against frustration and cynicism. We must stay the course with both communist urgency and communist patience. There are no shortcuts to revolution.
The bosses will never give up state power voluntarily. We need millions to join us worldwide and take it from them. Join PLP, and fight back!