When the bosses’ mad-dog cops murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the cause of death was capitalism.
Brown was shot six times by racist cop Darren Wilson for walking while black on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. Garner was killed by a chokehold by racist cop Daniel Pantaleo after trying to break up a fight on Staten Island, New York City. These are just two of many murders of black and Latin workers and youth nationwide. There are at least 400 police killings per year that are reported to the FBI by local police. These racist executions represent the rise of fascism —  capitalism in crisis, capitalism unmasked.  
As the U.S. faces off against rising imperialist rivals like China, and moves inevitably toward a broader war, U.S. rulers need to intimidate U.S. workers. Wages and social services (education, health, housing) must be cut to divert more resources to the bosses’ military machine. The working class has a long history of rising up against capitalist oppression. Our class-conscious anger, when channeled and organized under communist leadership, is the greatest threat to the bosses’ brutal system and their imperialist plans. As we’ve seen in Missouri and New York, they respond with both sticks and carrots, with terror and reforms.
In recent weeks, as multiracial masses of workers fight back in anti-racist rebellions and protests in 90 U.S. cities, the capitalists are doing all they can to divert blame from the profit system. Liberal politicians, editorial writers and academics cloud the issue by calling for police reform. But regardless of any superficial changes they make, the bosses will still hold state power. The cops and the courts will still serve them. A brutal and coercive state apparatus will keep the profits rolling in. With over two million people behind bars, and nearly another five million on probation or parole, the U.S. prison system is “by far the largest in the world” (National Research Council, 2014). The U.S. incarceration rate is 50 percent higher than Russia’s and six times the rate in China (International Centre for Prison Studies, 2013).
Racism is the brick and mortar of U.S. prisons and jails. Black and Latin people collectively make up about 30 percent of the general U.S. population, but close to 70 percent of the U.S. prison population — not because they commit more crimes, but because they are “differentially targeted and processed throughout the U.S. criminal justice system” (Psychology Today, 2/3/14).
Racism Oppresses ALL Workers
Bosses reap hundreds of billions of dollars in super-profits by keeping wages and living conditions for black, Latin and immigrant workers especially low. These racist differentials constitute a “race to the bottom.” Used as a club over white workers’ heads, they effectively drag down standards for all while boosting the capitalists’ bottom lines. In just one example, masses of white autoworkers were laid off after the auto bosses moved plants to lower-wage areas in the U.S. and to Latin America.
Cops help bosses break strikes. Segregation, racist terror, and the deportation of undocumented immigrants help perpetuate low pay, mass unemployment, and rotten schools and housing. The sexist oppression of women workers lowers wages even further. Meanwhile, the capitalists wage one imperialist oil war after the next, killing millions worldwide to protect their profits. The capitalists also need the cops to stifle anti-war dissent to keep the working class docile while they bang the drums of nationalism, a murderous anti-worker ideology.
Communism is the Answer
We need a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and racism once and for all. No ruling class has ever ceded its power peacefully. The bosses’ unceasing violence against the working class must be met with workers’ revolutionary violence. Workers’ power will eliminate the bosses and the profits stolen from the value produced by the working class. A communist society will be run by and for workers. That is the goal of Progressive Labor Party, which is organizing our class in more than twenty countries.
To forestall revolution and their ouster from power, the liberal bosses tell us the solution is to hire more black cops and elect more black officials. But those cops and officials will serve the same rotten ruling class.
Witness South Africa, where liberals ended apartheid in the 1990s. Today, most top government positions are held by black mouthpieces for the big bankers and industrialists. Unemployment is even higher now than under apartheid. Housing and health care are worse. Black bosses are enforcing the profit system to protect their piece of the profit pie. In 2012, a multi-racial police force massacred scores of striking black miners.
Or consider Israel, where the fascist rulers have established apartheid to oppress workers in Palestine. It is no coincidence that the Israeli bosses trained police in South Africa — along with the black police captain put in charge to cool down Ferguson. Racism is an international capitalist phenomenon.
Black Lackeys and Fascist Terror
From Obama on down, the U.S. bosses use a constellation of black lackeys, including FBI informer Al Sharpton, working hand-in-glove with the White House to divert the masses; Jesse Jackson, who was booed in Ferguson, and Attorney General Eric Holder, who allowed racist, murdering cops to roam free as chief of the force in Washington, DC (see Red Eye, page 7). Meanwhile, racist, fascist terror is mounting.
A master of deception, Obama tells us the main lesson of Ferguson is that police should not use Pentagon-supplied wartime weapons in U.S. neighborhoods. “President Obama has ordered a comprehensive review of the government’s decades-old strategy of outfitting local police departments with military-grade body armor, mine-resistant trucks, silencers and automatic rifles” (New York Times, 8/24/14).
In fact, Obama and the finance capitalists he serves aren’t worried about endangered workers. Police SWAT teams invade workers’ homes — sometimes killing innocents — an astounding 45,000 times a year (see “The War Comes Home,” page 8). But as Ferguson demonstrated, the rulers’ savage militarism can turn working-class protests more violent — a potential threat to profits. In any case, cutting back police firepower (for now) won’t change a thing. As servants of the class that holds state power, cops possess a license to kill. Cop Wilson gunned down Michael Brown with his standard service weapon. Cop Pantaleo strangled Eric Garner with his bare hands.
U.S. Racist Atrocities: Fuel for Foes
While U.S. bosses seem to have temporarily pacified angry workers in Missouri and New York, the racist murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner still give them cause for concern. With global conflict intensifying from Ukraine to Iraq and Syria, these outrages hinder the U.S. imperialists’ preparations for global wars. They desperately need support from their overseas allies. But as the rulers’ enemies grow bolder, this backing is proving elusive.
In “Ferguson From Afar” (8/21/14), Foreign Affairs, the leading finance-capital-funded policy journal in the U.S., noted: “Flagrant race discrimination … undermines U.S. efforts to appeal to the hearts and minds of peoples of the world.” The journal recalls how state-sponsored U.S. racism in the 1960s gave imperialist Russian rivals a huge advantage in Africa. Now U.S. foes in Russia, China and Iran — and even supposed friends in Saudi Arabia, Europe and South America — are using their mass media to highlight the latest racist atrocities and expose U.S. moralizing and hypocrisy. To much of the world, ISIS’s beheaders (see Red Eye, page 7) seem no worse than the U.S. rulers’ butcher cops.
Build Progressive Labor Party
Capitalists can occasionally muzzle their killer police in the name of reform. But to be free of racist cop terror, workers must rid the world of the profiteering class that creates it. This will happen only when the Progressive Labor Party is built into a mass working-class revolutionary party. It will happen only when we gather the strength to overthrow capitalism and establish communism: workers’ power. Join and build PLP now!