CHICAGO, November 27 — “Your power is in the streets, not looking around in stores! Take the streets!” A member of the Progressive Labor Party said this in response to a Black nationalist mis-leader during a march on a popular U.S. shopping day called “Black Friday.”A multiracial group of Progressive Labor Party members and friends attended the march on Michigan Avenue to protest the racist murder of Laquan McDonald by the Chicago kkkops. This area is where many expensive stores and shopsare, and was called by phony mis-leader Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition, and others. The Black nationalist mis-leaders wanted to lead the antiracist workers into the stores, “just look” around, and not buy anything.
The PL’ers marching have a better strategy than the dead-ends pushed by fakers like Jackson. These misleaders want to channel workers’ anger into walking around “just looking” inside ritzy stores in rich neighborhoods. These stores are too expensive for workers to shop in, and are done to make a publicity stunt to the capitalist media. PLP fights to unite our class, Asian, Latin, Black and White, to fight back!
Black Nationalism vs. Antiracism
PLP came to the march as a multiracial group, despite the efforts of local Black nationalist misleaders to exclude us because they wanted a “Black Space for Black Rage”. PLP opposes identity politics, like nationalism, and neither believes in nor fights for separate “spaces” for different workers with white skin or Black skin.
PL’ers spoke with marchers and contrasted our strategy with the nationalists. The intensity of rebellions led by the Black working class in places like Ferguson and Baltimore are testament to the intense oppression of Black workers in the U.S., especially women. Black leadership is key to building a mass multiracial communist movement to smash capitalism with armed revolution. Black nationalism offers no solutions to capitalism or the racism, sexism and imperialism it feeds on. Black nationalism merely changes the skin color of the capitalist oppressors, leaving Black workers exploited by someone who looks like them with the claim that it’s “progress”.
Black Workers Key To Revolution
One of the misleaders who spoke at the march showed their true colors and said we have to vote for Hillary, “so this will not happen again.” A PL member countered with a speech making the connections that ultimately it was capitalism that killed Laquan. Since Hillary Clinton is one of the biggest imperialists in the world, workers have no interest in her or any candidate the capitalists run for election.
As long as the capitalist system remains, the international working class will never be free of racist police terror, rampant unemployment, or the imperialist wars spawned by capitalism’s relentless drive for profit. Black workers, especially Black women, are hit the hardest under capitalism day in and day out. PLP emphasizes Black and women leadership and is organizing a mass working class movement because it will take the whole, united, multiracial working class to fight back together. Together, the working class can build our own mass leaders and smash this racist capitalist system and its genocidal cops with communist revolution. We have a world to win. Join us!