MILWAUKEE, July 16—Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined scores of enraged community members to protest the racist murder of Samuel Sharpe just hours after five Ohio killer KKKops shot him eight times in the back. Samuel’s friends and neighbors told us that the cops were 30 feet away and that he may have been in the midst of a mental health crisis when the police killed him. Samuel was displaced and living in an encampment near where he was murdered. 

Under capitalism, the police exist to protect the bosses’ property and serve the ruling class. In this case, 4000 extra police officers from outside the city flooded Milwaukee to, as a neighbor put it, “protect a rich Republican” (WISN12.com, 7/11). Displacement is a byproduct of the capitalist need to profit from the ownership and sale of private property. It is displaced workers like Samuel that are victimized all over the world by these profit- driven schemes and puts them at a higher risk of being terrorized by the police. 

We responded quickly to Samuel Sharpe’s murder and arrived at the crime scene around two hours after Samuel was shot. His friends and neighbors were outraged at the dozens of cops with machine guns who had blocked off the area. One of his friends said, “They got that yellow tape so they can investigate themselves and cover their tracks!"

No good cops in a racist system

Once we made it clear that we were not reporters, workers were very receptive to CHALLENGE and shared sharp ideas about what had happened to their friend. They expressed anger that Samuel’s murderers, the Columbus, Ohio Police Department, were only here in the first place for the RNC and explained that there had been encampment evictions in the area not long before the murder. Many agreed that neither Democrats or Republicans will change conditions for workers, and some spoke of the need for multiracial unity. One of Samuel’s neighbors blasted N.W.A.’s “F— Tha Police” from their car while we had political conversations. 

Some of Samuel’s neighbors argued that Milwaukee, not Ohio kkkops should have been in the neighborhood. All KKKops serve as the bosses’ army, and all terrorize the working class. The hands of Milwaukee police officers are just as drenched in blood–they murdered Sylville Smith in 2016 and Dontre Hamilton in 2014.

Liberal misleaders hold back the working class!

Later at a vigil and protest, liberal misleaders did their best to redirect the anger of the working class into reformist politics. The leader of the vigil, who did not know Samuel, refused to let a PLP comrade speak saying he was not “from the community” and criticized "outsiders" claiming they are not willing to visit the encampments (we did!). He then let someone from Philadelphia speak while shutting down a distraught worker who witnessed the shooting. As this worker yelled in anguish, "He had his hands up! I've got it on my phone,” the vigil leaders surrounded him and drowned him out with chants. 

The family of D’vontaye Mitchell, another Black worker murdered by Hyatt hotel security for no reason other than being a Black man living under racist capitalism, came to the protest in solidarity. But the vigil leaders did not allow them to speak either.

It’s clear from the mass deployment of KKKops to Milwaukee that the bosses and their servants know no borders. Neither should workers! In the fight for communism and collective liberation, no worker is an outsider. None of us are free until we are all free, and the end to police murder is impossible without the efforts of the international working class.

Workers want and deserve more!

During the march PLP members passed out CHALLENGE. Other comrades sharpened the politics of the reformists’ chants, which got a positive reception. Instead of “What do we want? Community control!” we chanted “What do we want? Revolution!” Even without a bullhorn, our chants were often the loudest in the crowd. Police drones and helicopters flew overhead, and representatives of the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service were there to “keep the heat down,” which really means to control working class anger about state murder!  As we ended the march, one comrade led us in a rousing and energetic, “Fight back, fight back, we want freedom, freedom! All these racist killer cops-– we don’t need em, need em!” It was evident that workers want more than reforms and performative rituals. Join us in the fight that workers need and deserve—the fight for communism and a world free of police murder, genocide, and ruling class elections. Join Progressive Labor Party!

July 3, 2024, Philadelphia, PA—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends joined other members of the National Education Association (NEA), for their annual convention. On the agenda were several new business items (NBIs) related to Palestine that education workers have been fighting for including specifically teaching about the Nakba and genocide, undoing the NEA's endorsement of Genocide Joe Biden for president, building solidarity between education workers and anti-genocide protesters, and calling for more funding for education instead of war. 

We have been struggling against war budgets in one district where they were underfunded by $55 million but managed to contribute more than $400 million for nuclear weapons to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Then the district laid off teachers, closed its virtual academy, and cut back pre-kindergarten programs. Just another example of the priorities of capitalism to fund profit and imperialist wars over educating working class children. PLP linked their local struggles to the struggle against capitalism which can only be destroyed by organizing workers for a communist revolution.

Rally against genocide

To kick-off the convention, attendees organized a rally and march in support of the NBIs and against the genocide in Palestine. The rally was inspirational and energetic. The multiracial group of educators held signs, flags and wore keffiyehs in support of the proposed NBIs. Zionists staged a counter-rally a mere 50 feet from us, where they were (of course) protected by the police. At our rally, each NBI proposer came to the microphone to explain the rationale and importance of their proposal to cheers and applause. Jewish teachers spoke passionately about their support for the end of the genocide. A PLP member spoke about attempting to pass a ceasefire resolution in their local union that was ruled “out of order”(CHALLENGE,3/16). When they denounced capitalism and made the call for the working class to break free and create a new life, where we would all get what we need, the crowd applauded and shouted words of support. 

As the Zionist counter protests became louder, the speaker yelled at them to shut up! Our group showed that we were unafraid and ready to fight back. They ended the speech with the chant “Arab, Jewish, Black, white, Latin, and Asian - to free Palestine and all nations we must unite!” Other PLP members distributed about 30 CHALLENGES headlined “Communism is Liberation.” A leaflet also detailed the demands of teachers who are fighting back against false charges of antisemitism because of their support for Palestine and criticism of the U.S. and Israel's role in the genocide.

After a few more teachers spoke, it was time to march! The multiracial, multi-generational group of educators marched enthusiastically through the streets of Philadelphia chanting, “Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel's crimes!” and “Not another penny, not another quarter, no more money for Israel's slaughter.” At the park, we engaged in more chants and then heard from teachers who have been experiencing repercussions for speaking out against the war. One teacher's students created a podcast to discuss the genocide in Gaza and, despite being approved by the administration, another teacher leaked the students’ photos and address to dangerous Zionist groups. Two more teachers talked about their experiences of being placed on administrative leave for speaking or posting in support of Palestine and against the ruling class of Israel and the IDF.

Convention canceled

Fortunately, the conference did not go on as planned; it was shut down  by the workers who make the NEA, and the imperialist system it defends run, so none of the NBIs were debated. Conferences like these provide an opportunity to advocate for our class siblings in Palestine, and also to meet and befriend more educators who are interested in good causes and with whom we can discuss alternatives to capitalism.

We need to continue to bring our message of antiracist, working-class solidarity and class war against the capitalists. A united working class is an unstoppable force that can truly make a change. Joining the PLP is the way to create worker unity and topple capitalism once and for all! Power to the working class! Join us!

This August marks the 79th anniversary of the single most murderous act of terrorism in world history when the U.S. ruling class—the only rulers to ever use nuclear bombs—dropped atomic bombs on two civilian Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This obliterated a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in a matter of seconds, injured hundreds of thousands more, and left future generations with everlasting genetic defects.

The racist U.S. rulers launched this heinous attack as a political warning to the then-socialist Soviet Union, signaling U.S. imperialism’s launching of the Cold War. Capitalists will stop at nothing when their domination is at stake. This is the natural outcome of a system rooted in the violence of exploitation. 

Today capitalist violence is worldwide and growing. Workers are being slaughtered in profiteering wars from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine. And the imperialist powers are preparing for world war to redivide the world for plunder. The working class instead needs to turn their guns on the imperialist bosses. Then we can build a world based on human need. For that, we need millions worldwide to organize under an international communist party, Progressive Labor Party (PLP,) to turn the next capitalist atrocity and war into a class war for communism.

The lies and the reality

For over seven decades, U.S. rulers have tried to justify the A-bomb attacks by maintaining they were needed to force Japan’s surrender and avoid a U.S. land invasion and a million U.S. casualties. In reality, Japan’s rulers were ready to surrender before Hiroshima:

 • According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, a board of military and civilian experts established by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “Certainly…in all probability prior to November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bomb had not been dropped…and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

   • A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, later the U.S. National Security Adviser, “confessed that he had pulled those numbers out of the air to justify the bombings” (LA Times, 8/5/2005).

   • By the spring of 1945, Japan’s entire industrial and military machine had ground to a halt, severing its oil lifeline. By June, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay complained that there was nothing left to bomb in Japanese cities except “garbage can targets.”

   • General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Pacific commander, considered the A-bombs “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” (James Clayton, The Years of MacArthur, 1941-1945, Vol. II).

A genocide aimed at the USSR

If overwhelming evidence shows that the genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily unnecessary, and that Japan was on the verge of unconditional surrender, why did President Harry Truman order the A-bombs dropped?

The true purpose was to warn the then-socialist Soviet Union that the U.S. had a new and devastating weapon, and was ready to use it against any threat to the U.S. imperialists’ world dominance. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the beginning of the Cold War between capitalists in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Some supporting evidence:

• With the Soviet Red Army ready to enter the war against Japan by August 8, the U.S. rushed to use the bomb two days earlier, to play what Stimson referred to as a “mastercard”: “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else….We have to regain the lead…in a pretty rough and realistic way….We have coming into action a weapon which will be unique” (Stimson diary).

• In an implicit indictment of the liberal Democrat Truman administration, Leo Szilard, creator of the the idea of a nuclear fission reactor said, “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities…we would have defined [it]…as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”

The lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the U.S. ruling class will stop at nothing to preserve its state power and profit. Which means the next world war is only a matter of time. It remains for the international working class to mete out justice to the most murderous criminals the world has ever known.

This article is reprinted from the September 28, 2016 issue of CHALLENGE. Although September 9, 1971, marks the beginning of the Attica Prison Rebellion, this month we commemorate Black August, a holiday honoring the bravery and sacrifice of the Attica prisoners, as well as the bold and militant leadership of Black workers from the prison galleys to the streets around the world, fighting against the imperialist system and its violently racist policies.

Today, the U.S. imprisons more workers than any other country in the world. More than 2 million-primarily working-class blacks-are incarcerated. This is a 500% increase since 1973, equivalent to 5% of the world’s population (American Civil Liberties Union). This is no accident; mass incarceration is one of the racist tools used by the bosses to solve the crisis of their declining system. The rulers use prisons to extract racist super-profits from the near enslavement of black workers, while maintaining a surplus of marginalized unemployed workers whom they deprive of benefits and jobs. More importantly, the rulers use prisons as a means of crushing black worker revolutionary potential and the unity of the working class.

The exponential growth of mass incarceration was the result of the U.S. rulers’ manufactured war on drugs, which they saw as their solution to the Black worker-led rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s. With the rise of racist murders of workers in prisons - from Rikers Island in New York to the Elmore County jail in Alabama - the Attica jail rebellion remains tragically relevant. Liberal rulers are trying to scare working people into voting Democratic with the prospect of a Trump presidency and Project 2025. The mass incarceration policies they warn are coming with Project 2025 are already here, thanks to a long list of Democrats, including Big Fascists Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Then as now black workers remain central to working-class liberation as the key fighting force for communist revolution.

Not only are conditions worse today than they were during Attica,… Attica once again…. is synonymous with prisoner resistance.
—Heather Ann Thompson, history professor at the University of Michigan, (Jacobin, 9/9)

Fifty-three  years ago, Black imprisoned workers led their white and Latin counterparts in a rebellion against the racist deplorable conditions at Attica prison in northwestern New York State. Today prisoners nationwide are organizing once again. Capitalism is a never-ending disaster. For workers, students and prisoners worldwide only communism is a solution: a world without racism, sexism or imperialist wars.
Concentration camp

In September of 1971, the conditions at Attica prison in the northwest corner of New York State were brutal. Inmates suffered from starving bellies, untreated infections, falling teeth, lack of toilet paper, and showers only once a week often without any soap (Jacobin, 9/9). With about 2,300 inmates, Attica was overcrowded to almost twice its capacity. The prisoner population was 54 percent Black, 9 percent Puerto Rican and 37 percent white. All 383 guards were white.

So the prisoners organized. They read Marx and Frantz Fanon. They formed the Attica Liberation Faction uniting different political groupings. They had educational rap sessions in the prison yard. They put together demands for improved conditions and sent them to state, city and prison officials. All demands for change by the prisoners were ignored.

Rebellion

After a prisoner fought back against a brutal guard, the prison bosses ordered a crackdown that led to a violent fight. The prison guard was beaten and eventually died. But a small group of more politicized prisoners immediately changed it into an organized rebellion. Meetings were held, demands were discussed and formulated, and leaders were chosen. A central part of the prison called Times Square was fortified. They chose a negotiation committee. They figured out how to feed 1,300 people and obtained medical care for those most in need.

Rockefeller’s fascist savagery

But New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and various authorities were not interested in negotiations. They had a two-pronged racist strategy: spread vicious lies about the rebellious prisoners and viciously attack them as soon as possible. Both the media and various officials spread racist lies about supposed atrocities committed by the rebels, including slitting the throats of the hostages. The attack by the state involved hundreds of state cops, National Guardsmen, and both current and former prison guards. They were handed weapons from a supply truck without regard to serial numbers and they had their own personal weapons.

Road to mass incarceration

The attack started with a gas that incapacitated the rebelling prisoners. This was followed by fifteen minutes of indiscriminate shooting that slaughtered 29 prisoners and 9 guards. After the prison was totally secured, four more prisoners-leaders of the rebellion- were hunted down and killed. That was followed by vicious beatings, torture and no medical care. Heather Ann Thompson: “In the aftermath is when the real brutality begins. The doctors are trying to help prisoners, while guards are dumping them off of stretchers, kicking them, urinating into wounds, making the most horrific scene unfold.” (Democracy Now, 7/9).

President Richard “Nixon repeatedly assured Rockefeller he did the right thing, because Attica was “the Blacks,” and part of a nationwide conspiracy by the communists and Black radicals to undermine [U.S.]” (truth-out, 9/9). Within a year, Rockefeller enacted a law that formed the seeds of the “war on drugs” (racist war on workers) operation.

Attica scared the bosses, and they reacted with more terrorization of the Black and Latin working class. In 1970, the year before Attica, there were nearly 200,000 people in prison. By 2015, that number was 2.3 million people, a 400 percent increase in the rate of incarceration (Five-Thirty-Eight, 2/12/16).

Attica is a symbol of working-class rebellion and viciously racist aftermath. Attica today means fightback against racist state terror.
Prisons can be a site of struggle and fightback. At the Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan 400 prisoners protested today to commemorate Attica. And more are organizing again against deplorable prison conditions throughout the country. Nationwide protests are growing against racism and sexism. More than ever, we need to fight for communism to end these capitalist atrocities once and for all.