COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, July 18 — “Shut this racist rally down! Chase them out of town!” Scores of anti-racists took up Progressive Labor Party’s chants at a rally here against the Ku Klux Klan. Both Black and white working-class families welcomed PLP’s call for multiracial unity against all forms of nationalism.
South Carolina has been rocked by racist murders. Walter Scott was shot in the back by kkkop Michael Slager after a routine traffic stop. Klan-lover Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emmanuel AME Church, spurring a national debate over public displays of the Confederate flag. Black youth take the lead and batter a kkk scum!
The bosses permitted two nationalist protests at the South Carolina State House. On the north side steps were Black nationalists advocating for the “power in the melanin” and for Black capitalism. On the south side were the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement, a Nazi organization, calling for white power.
The white supremacists waved Confederate flags and performed Hitler salutes. In response, PLP and others in the crowd chanted, “Death, death, death to the racists!”
PLP has a long history of fighting Klan and Nazi groups. We invaded a Nazi headquarters in Chicago and physically stopped them from broadcasting from a Kansas City radio station. We smashed David Duke and his forces in Boston. We burned a Klan hood at a John Brown demonstration in Texas and stood up against armed Klansmen in Tupelo, Mississippi. More recently, we infiltrated and attacked these gutter racists at New York City Hall and in Morristown, New Jersey.
In short, these cowardly fascists have a history of taking a beating from anti-racists. And that’s what happened here today. A group of Black rebels beat a KKK scum who had earlier taunted the crowd with racist slurs. Wherever fascists are on the attack, the working class must up the ante and fight back.
Part of fighting back means attacking the root of racism: capitalist state power. The ruling class runs on racist exploitation of workers. U.S. bosses reap billions of dollars each year by paying Black, Latin, and migrant workers less than white workers. The genocide of indigenous people and enslavement of Black people is the foundation of U.S. state power. All capitalist institutions are built on this bedrock of racism: the government, police, military, industry, schools, prisons, churches, media, hospitals, and more.
Just as the Nazis won much of the German working class to its genocidal ideology, U.S. ruling-class racism helps gutter racist groups dupe poor white workers into scapegoating other members of their class. By dividing workers with the mythical concept of race, the rulers make it more difficult for communists to build the multiracial movement we need to smash the system.
PLP fights for communist state power. The working class will rule every aspect of society. This world will be based on need and collectivity, not racist and sexist exploitation. Wherever we put forward these ideas, workers respond to them. More than 500 anti-racists, Black and white, took our leaflets and CHALLENGEs in Columbia. Some signed up for a CHALLENGE subscription.
Black Capitalism Is Still Capitalism
Unfortunately, despite a small PL presence, the most conspicuous alternative to the neo-Nazis was a group of Black nationalists. These counter-revolutionaries called for a country without “Indian, Chinese, or Irish” workers. They called upon Black people to “buy Black and invest in Black businesses”—in other words, to identify and ally with Black capitalists. They also threatened “any blue-eyed devil” who “dared to come” to their town hall meeting after the rally.
Nationalism is the rulers’ main tool to divide our class. It traps us into false unity with groups of bosses based on nationality or race, from Barack Obama to the new Black police chief in Ferguson, Missouri. It leads to our self-destruction. As the historian Lerone Bennett wrote in 1970 in The Road Not Taken,
Before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them…these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy….The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and white in order to make money.
The need for a common struggle against capitalism is no less urgent today. Workers from Haiti to South Africa to Cuba must no longer retreat from communist revolution. Those who organize along nationalist lines are lining their own pockets, not serving the international working class.
In Columbia, amid the Confederate and Black nationalist flags, the working class of South Carolina was presented with an alternative: the red flag of communist revolution. Capitalism lives off nationalist division. What it can’t survive is a mass, multiracial communist party. For the working class worldwide, that party is PLP.