The abominable racism that produced the fascistic attacks on Black workers and youth in Ferguso  by the rulers and their cops — as revealed in the actions detailed in Redeye (page 7) — is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the logical extension of the 400-year racist history of the U.S. that had its origin in slavery. The super-exploitation of Black workers has become the foundation of the economy of global capitalism without which the profit system would be on far shakier ground.
In the U.S., slavery was written into the constitution. The first eight presidents were slaveholders. After 400 slave revolts and the abolitionist movement that abolished slavery legally, the enslavement of Black workers took different forms.
From the Civil War on to World War II — Jim Crow segregation laws, over 5,000 lynchings, the rampant attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, and the bosses’ state power — all enforced racism on Black workers in all aspects of life. This includes lower wages, last hired/first fired producing double unemployment rates, second-class medical care and education, segregated slum housing and the indiscriminate arrests of Black people sending them to prisons to be used as slave labor on Southern plantations.
Even as the fight against racism by Black workers as part of a communist-led working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s brought temporary reforms, in the seven decades since the end of World War II the racist conditions continued. Racist police murders in the big cities, the rulers’ Drug Wars that helped imprison 1.2 million Black workers and youth — half of the 2.4 million total incarcerated in U.S. jails — and the maintenance of discrimination in all sectors of life combined to produce over $600 billion annually  in super-profits for the bosses. That is the difference in family income of Black and now Latin workers as compared to white workers. The assets of Black families are one-tenth that of white families.
So now comes Ferguson. Surprise? Hardly. As the incidents reported indicate, the Black working class of Ferguson is subject to the various racist attacks that U.S. bosses have imposed on Black workers for centuries. That city’s rulers, from the city manager to the mayor to the police chief to the city finance manager to the court’s judges, all have wielded their state power to enforce the bosses’ profits: arresting Black people at gunpoint, using stun guns, tasers, jailings for non-payment of fraudulent debts: a modern debtors’ prison.
This racism is not just limited to Ferguson or even to the St. Louis region. It exists in one form or another in cities throughout the U.S. to produce that $600 billion in extra profits.
It is against this racism that Ferguson’s Black workers and youth, along with anti-racist whites, have rebelled and will continue to rebel. It is in this ferment that Progressive Labor Party has participated and spread our communist ideas, in Ferguson, across the land and beyond U.S. shores. Communism is the only answer to this racism and its source in capitalist exploitation. Only a worker-run communist society can free our class from bosses, profits, racism, sexism, mass unemployment, poverty and the profit-driven wars that the ruling class imposes on us, using to kill our sister and brother workers worldwide. Truly, Ferguson means FIGHT BACK!