CHICAGO, November 24 — A year ago today, Ferguson erupted in a second rebellion after the bosses’ grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson, the racist murderer of Mike Brown.
On this one-year anniversary, after the city government hid it for 400 days, the Chicago Police Department released video of the murder of Laquan McDonald, a Black seventeen-year-old. The video shows Laquan collapsing after a kkkop fires sixteen rounds into him.
A multiracial group of Progressive Labor Party members and friends attended a march to protest the racist murder of Laquan. Workers around Chicago are enraged by the state execution, and are ready to fight. PLP organizes all workers to fight back with multiracial unity, and hold Black workers as key force to worldwide revolution to destroy capitalism.
Know Your Enemy
The protest was organized by University of Chicago-sponsored Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). “This is a space for Black rage, for Black people,” read the Facebook event page. The paralyzing politics of Black nationalism, and the power of multiracial unity became clear in the streets. More than a third of the demonstration consisted of white workers, and it was only our combined numbers that made it possible for us to take over an intersection. BYP100 tried to recreate the bosses’ division of workers by race, which killed the potential to take over Lake Shore Drive, a major highway (more next issue).
If organized with militant multiracial unity under one red leadership, we could have shut down more of the city and would have been better prepared to fend off the attacks by the police during the march. Instead, Black nationalist politics severed working-class forces and is handicapping the fight against police terror. Our enemy is the capitalist state and the goons in blue that protect them, not white antiracists.
Many workers and students were receptive to PLP politics that only taking state power with communist revolution will stop racist police terror. We distributed CHALLENGE, and some have their information to be invited to more PL events.
Racists Emboldened by Capitalist State Terror
As PLP grows in more than 28 countries, a movement with this power can do more than shut down intersections; it can smash racist terror. This past week, three fascists — emboldened by U.S. bosses’ terrorist reign on Black, Latin, immigrant, and refugee workers; cops getting away with murder; more open gutter racists in the bosses’ media — shot five Black youth protesting the police murder of 24-year-old Black worker Jamar Clark in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The police have killed over 1,083 people since the murder of Mike Brown (Vice, 8/9/15). Individual terrorism is unsurprising under a system that feeds off of the racist, sexist exploitation of the working class? Open racist terror is escalating against workers worldwide, from Minneapolis to Syria to South Africa, while rival U.S. and Russian imperialists square off in the Middle East and gear up for a major ground war (see page 2).
As long there is capitalism, workers worldwide will never be free of racist police terror, or the imperialist wars spawned by capitalism’s relentless drive for profit. PLP is organizing a mass working-class movement to fight back, and smash this racist capitalists and their murderous state with communist revolution. We call on all CHALLENGE readers and PLP collectives around the world to raise antiracist politics and actions at your job, school, or community organization. Give no free speech for racists and nationalists — the victory hinges on the multiracial unity of Black, white, Asian, Latin, indigenous, and immigrant workers.