The flash flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, home to the July rebellion following the racist police murder of Alton Sterling, is a capitalist disaster. The floods expose both the bosses’ rotten profit system and the working class’s potential to run society without exploitation.
More than 7,000 have been made homeless and are trapped in over-crowded shelters. Thirteen have died and 100,000 homes were damaged. Altogether, 400,000 people were devastated by the floods. Every one of them is a victim of capitalism.
“Natural” Disasters are Preventable
Nature may create massive downpours, but capitalism—a system run by and for the bosses—creates the disasters. After a historic 1983 flood of the Baton Rouge area, the result of an improperly built highway bridge, politicians and government agencies made promises to prevent future problems. But since the capitalist bosses don’t view infrastructure for the working class as a lucrative source of profits, nothing happened. “Local officials began taking steps to improve flood protection systems such as raising highway bridges, upgrading levees and even approving a tax to fund a portion of the project by 2000. However, those efforts were not sustained” (veoci.com, 8/25).
The Comite River Diversion Canal could have protected people and homes, but the project—despite funding by workers’ taxes since 2001—has been delayed for more than 30 years. This isn’t new technology. The human species has been cutting canals since Mesopotamia around 520 BC.
Media Blackout, Government Disregard
To avoid distractions from the patriotic zeal of the Rio Olympics, the capitalist media has mostly ignored the worst U.S. disaster since Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As the New York Times’ public editor admitted, “No doubt this is a busy news period….But a news organization like the Times…surely can find a way to cover a storm that has ravaged such a wide stretch of the country’s Gulf Coast.”
The local bosses in Baton Rouge were no better. One resident. Linda Smith, said there were no effective warnings: “We got no calls, no texts, no nothing.” No one was evacuated from the area before the most serious rainfall began.
This disregard is blatantly racist. Black workers in Louisiana have an official unemployment rate of 9.5 percent, more than twice the rate for white workers. Baton Rouge, the state capital and a majority Black city, ranked first in the U.S. for HIV and AIDS case rates in 2013. The vast majority of these cases are in the segregated Black working-class neighborhood of north Baton Rouge, where one-third of Black workers live below the poverty line, and only 46 percent of Black men have graduated from high school (New York Times, 7/11).
Eleven days after the flooding began, President Barack Obama praised the notoriously negligent Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2005, during deadly Hurricane Katrina, FEMA stopped rescue missions and food from reaching families and put people in trailer homes with toxic levels of formaldehyde. More than a decade later, people are still living in these poisonous tin cans!
Learning From Katrina
Some flood victims in Baton Rouge may have already suffered from the racism during Katrina; the city provided refuge for displaced families from New Orleans. Katrina exposed the racist core of capitalism, and how the bosses use disasters for the working class as an opportunity to develop fascist policies for the not-so-distant future. Understanding Katrina can prepare the working class for what to expect and fight today.
The capitalist class and their politicians turned the unnatural disaster Katrina into the mass murder of more than 1,400 mostly Black workers. New Orleans was treated as a war zone. Liberal politicians like Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic presidential candidate, called for expanding FEMA’s powers and withdrawing troops from Iraq for deployment in New Orleans. Military units were brought in to protect private property and join the police in harassing what was left of the city’s Black population.
But Black workers and youth took matters into their own hands. They provided water, food, diapers and rescue efforts for families and neighbors. This was working-class collectivity at its best. Meanwhile, the racist capitalist media condemned the workers as looters and violent criminals.
In solidarity with workers in New Orleans, Progressive Labor Party led a summer-long project with political actions, cleanup, and communist ideas, all while the city was still under military occupation. In other cities, PLP organized relief efforts and spread communist politics among refugees in Texas and the Midwest. We mobilized hundreds of workers to attack the liberal bosses’ plan to expand the military occupation. Our slogan: “From New Orleans to Iraq, the working class must fight back!”
Our work in New Orleans taught us how to strengthen solidarity with our working-class sisters and brothers in Baton Rouge. We are following the leadership of these workers, whose instinct for collectivity is apparent as they organize food, shelter and support for each other. As education workers and students head back to school in cities where our Party has concentrations, we can expose the racism of capitalism by making Baton Rouge a center of fightback.
Black Workers’ Revolutionary Leadership
In July, thousands of workers and youth in Baton Rouge rebelled against the local police murder of Alton Sterling. Sterling’s murder was no accident. As one Black worker told PL, “The police who shot him knew him. Knew who he was. These were the same police that always patrol the neighborhood. They knew what they were doing.”
The task of Progressive Labor Party is to help open the floodgates of working-class revolt and channel it toward communist revolution. Baton Rouge is yet another example of Black workers playing the lead role in our multiracial fight for an egalitarian world.
BALTIMORE, MD, August 14—Members of the Progressive Labor Party, along with students and workers in Baltimore, are waging an aggressive fight against the police murder of Black and Latin lives and the capitalist system that generates such injustices. Together with our friends, we have been part of the citywide protests against the police murder of Freddie Gray and the weekly Wednesday rallies for Tyrone West. On Saturday we joined a multiracial group of protesters that included the Baltimore Bloc, the City Bloc, and others, in marching through Artscape, the city’s arts festival. These protests have been militant in nature-with many arrests at the July 16 and today’s protests. We are showing that this racist system has to go and the working class will not stand by while the cops murder our sisters and brothers.
Korryn Gaines: Murdered by KKKops
This message of fightback is critical in Baltimore, where the cops and politicians have shown wanton disregard for Black and Latin lives. On August 1, in a racist and sexist act, the Baltimore County police murdered Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old Black woman, and shot her 5-year-old son when they went to her home to serve an arrest warrant for a missing license plate!
Not too long ago, a Baltimore judge acquitted three cops, and prosecutors then dropped charges against the rest of the racist police gang who murdered Freddie Gray on April 12 last year. This outrage occurred at the same time as the police murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Filled with rage at these injustices and countless others worldwide, we took to the street, joining hands with students and workers to bring revolutionary changes.
Protesters Defy Orders
As expected, the police state apparatus came well prepared to smash our fight back. When some demonstrators used a decoy protest to march onto the I-83 ramp (closed for Artscape) and then moved onto the northbound lane of the Jones Falls Expressway to block traffic, they were tricked by the cops. The cop had asked them to let an ambulance through, and when they complied, they found out that the “ambulance” was the police and their wagons! The protestors didn’t let this stop them however; they militantly locked arms in defiance of police orders to stop!
Turning Arrests into Talks of Communism
Echoing the escalation of police terror in the mass roundup of protestors in Baton Rouge, dozens of cops encircled everyone, including onlookers, legal observers, and photographers. None were allowed to leave. Police then swept up everyone in a mass arrest of 65 residents, including 10 youth. All were handcuffed, kept in vans in the heat, without water for 7-14 hours, and eventually released with fines and citations.
While detained, a young member of Progressive Labor Party successfully helped turn that awful situation into its opposite, into something positive. He and the five others in that particular wagon talked quite a bit. The young comrade helped everyone gain valuable insights about state power today, explaining how the police, jails, government and courts are really a system of organized violence to suppress the working class. He also contributed another very important understanding, that the working class can and must smash this capitalist state, and build a state of a new type, run exclusively by the working class, to lead a communist society in which we will struggle successfully to completely defeat the legacy of huge inequities and, in their place, achieve a fully egalitarian world!
Turning Reform into Revolution
Although militant in their actions, some protestors called for reformist measures to end police brutality. Some demanded that citizens be added to internal police trial boards because the community has a “right to self determination and a right to have an impact in the process of bringing a sense of justice… into their own community.” Some protesters also called for a “reallocation of 10% of the policing budget away from militarization of local police forces and mechanisms of community control and surveillance and towards community programming.” These demands are similar to those of the mass struggle to bring about police reform at the state level during Maryland’s legislative session this year. But those efforts, which engaged hundreds in protests, press conferences, and lobbying, led to only minor changes in the laws that protect the police from being held accountable.
The capitalist bosses and politicians will not rein in the racist cops that protect their exploitative system through violence and intimidation. Instead, PLP members fight for a world without prisons and racist police. That can only be achieved through communist revolution. As a result of the PLP’s engagement in these struggles, these revolutionary, communist ideas have begun to enter the consciousness of many who never considered them before
Say No to Capitalist Masters
No reforms under capitalism can eliminate racism, state sanctioned police intimidation and brutality, or the profiteering system that keeps these in place. The growing movement against the police and racism is facing a ruling class ever more desperate to heighten racism and support “law and order.” Listening to Trump and his supporters reminds us of the “tough on crime” rhetoric of Republicans Reagan and Nixon that ushered in the War on Drugs and the era of mass incarceration, followed by Democrat Bill Clinton’s 100,000 more cops and “Three Strikes and You’re Out” that accelerated mass incarceration and criminalization. Democratic and Republican politicians agree on serving their capitalist masters by deepening racism and repression in the service of maximum profits. Revolutionary leadership from PLP must expose both parties as they hypocritically call for reform. We must lead the working class to the conquest of state power through communist revolution.
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In Memory of Ezell Ford, Healthcare Workers Fight KKKops
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- 01 September 2016 84 hits
LOS ANGELES—Progressive Labor Party led 16 healthcare workers and friends from the community in a rally outside our clinic against racist police murder. The mother, grandmother, and three siblings of Ezell Ford, who was murdered by the police, also joined our small but spirited contingent.
At the start, a few workers were concerned about marching and doing militant chants like “Rise up, Resist, need no killer cops, no jails, The whole damn system is guilty as hell” and “Racist cops you can’t hide, We charge you with genocide.” However once we got started, we received overwhelming support from cars and people passing by. One neighborhood woman whose cousin was murdered by LAPD joined us and stayed the entire time. She gave us her contact and said that next time, she would invite all of her family and friends. The overwhelming support from the community emboldened us and erased any initial fears. This was our first rally, but it will definitely not be our last!
We held our rally to commemorate the two-year anniversary of Ezell Ford’s murder, whose family we have ties with. To make matters worse, the LAPD murdered 14-year-old Jesse Romero two days ago. Hundreds marched in response and PLP will be participating in continued vigils and demonstrations around both Ezell and Jesse’s killings.
These murders are added proof that we need to smash capitalism. As workers get angrier over these killings, the bosses respond with fake solutions to calm us down. They talk about diversifying police forces, but LAPD shows us that this will not erase the inherent racism in capitalism. LAPD not only boasts the most diverse police force but also boasts the most people killed by police this year, mostly Black and Latin youth. Clearly more “police of color” is not a solution to systematic racism. No reforms can fix the police because the police aren’t broken; they’re working exactly as they were set up to do serve the interest of the ruling class. They terrorize Black and Latin workers to keep the working class from fighting back and ultimately to allow capitalists to keep exploiting us to make super profits.
As capitalism deteriorates, workers get angrier and police terror increases. More workers than ever are disillusioned, with record numbers seeing politicians as misleaders and refusing to vote. Workers see that capitalism cannot provide a good life and rebellions are flaring up all over the world. The ruling class is preparing for wider rebellions: under Obama local police departments have increased militarization more than 24-fold and 2016 is on pace to have record numbers of murder-by-kkkop.
Being revolutionary communists, it is our job to expose the police and turn the sparks of rebellions into the fire of revolution. In LA, we are doing just that. A few more co-workers at the healthcare clinic are now receiving CHALLENGE. One co-worker and student came to a sermon that a comrade gave at his church on the origins of racism and police terror this past weekend. The next step will be developing a study group with hopes of building a small healthcare club.
The mostly Black and Latin workers of this clinic and surrounding neighborhood represent the future of our movement. If we can continue to organize in our work places and mass organizations and connect them with the class-struggle, we will have a chance of growing our Party and building a movement that will one day smash this racist profit system once and for all.
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LA Summer Project Energizes Antiracist Fightback
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- 01 September 2016 67 hits
Los Angeles, July 28—What a way to end our summer project! We started with a rally in support of the anti-racist fighters who were arrested for fighting back against the KKK invasion of Pearson Park on February 27th. While the KKK scum who stabbed 4 people were let off, these 7 anti-racists were arrested and are being charged with combinations of misdemeanor assault, battery and resisting arrest. Before the hearing, a crowd of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends as well as anti-racists from various Unitarian Universalist churches rallied for an hour chanting: “The Cops, the Courts, the Ku Klux Klan: All a Part of the Bosses’ Plan!” We met many people including a lawyer who asked if he could work pro bono as a part of the Anaheim 7’s defense. Afterwards we went into the courtroom to show our support for the defendants. We made a united exit en masse when the hearing ended. Reducing the courtroom audience by half was a dramatic end to our summer project.
Our court action was the culmination of the 2016 PLP Los Angeles Summer Project. The project started with a fundraising party. The support from our friends was very uplifting. We spoke about the importance of struggling together against the government’s racism. During the project, members and friends participated in Challenge sales, study groups, rallies, a movie night, and a forum.
We struggled with each other to put together a sharp, clear forum on the elections. We met and practiced multiple times. The final presentation was humorous and clear on our line that elections are not the answer. Afterward we had discussions with our friends about the alternative to voting; fighting back on our jobs, in the schools, and in the streets.
We also had a demonstration outside LA County District Attorney Jackie Lacey’s office demanding that she take action against the police murders of Ezell Ford and Brendon Glenn (see photo). At this rally, everyone was asked to speak on the bullhorn. This was great practice for our members who did a good job of highlighting the hypocrisy of the “justice system” that promotes racist police brutality and murder.
A two-part study group read and discussed “The Road Not Taken,” a PLP pamphlet (excerpted from The Shaping of Black America by Lerone Bennett Jr.) explaining how race and racism were created by the colonial ruling class to enforce slavery. Many comrades and friends were amazed at the brazen way these colonial slave owners created laws to separate the previously united white indentured servants and Black slaves. We discussed how these rulers had to create laws prohibiting relations between Blacks and whites because these relations were the norm and the Black and white unity threatened the power of the colonial elite. The colonial slave owners used the churches, the media and most of all force against both whites and Blacks for centuries before the ideas of race and racism became as accepted as they are today! This idea that racism had a starting point in history, the colonial period in the Americas, and therefore will have an ending point, communist revolution, was the powerful conclusion of our study groups.
At our movie night, we watched “Central Park 5”. It was about a group of young Black men in New York City who were falsely accused of raping a white woman. We had a discussion about how the capitalist media demonized these young, Black men and how the bosses continue to do this today in order to separate workers. Past racist prosecutions such as this are similar to our current struggles against racist cops and the Klan. The entire “criminal injustice” system is guilty of racism. We need the courage to confront the law when necessary to protect our class brothers and sisters.
Overall our summer project was successful. We struggled to get our friends to come out to many events, and all of our members participated in most everything. The rally at court energized us to continue our fight against the prosecution of the anti-racist fighters who fought the KKK in Anaheim. Our fight against the racist system was given a jolt by this summer project and our understanding of the role of racism and police terror was deepened. We look forward to another year of struggle, strengthened by our summer’s work.
In June 2016, all cops responsible for Freddie Gray’s murder were let off the hook. This monstrous miscarriage of justice is just one of many; Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Kyam Livingston, and too many others have failed to get justice. Why does this racist injustice happen nonstop? Non-indictments and exonerations of kkkops result from deliberate decisions made by the courts even before the trial. The courts and cops work together to ensure that the racist terrorization of Black, Latin, and immigrant workers continues and to thus protect capitalism. It is not a failed or corrupt system—this is just capitalist government at work.
In April 2015 Freddie Gray, a Black man in Baltimore, was killed in transport to the police station. His hands and legs were shackled while in transport. He arrived at the station in a coma with a broken neck and injured spinal cord, and died soon after.
Six cops, both Black and white, were responsible for this murder. A rebellion in Baltimore and mass protests around the United States forced the government to indict all these cops. However, not a single one was found guilty.
The decision to find them all not guilty was made in September 2015 when the judge, a Black man, ordered the cops be tried separately rather than as a group. The trial against cop Porter ended in a mistrial. Cops Nero, Goodson, and Rice were found not guilty. The remaining charges against cops Miller and White were dropped. So why were there separate trials? As separate defendants there is no way that any of them could have been convicted. Unlike workers, each kkkop is considered innocent until proven guilty, and there were no witnesses to testify to the murder. The only live witnesses would be each other, and there is a code of silence among cops. The only witness who was not a cop, Freddie himself, was dead.
Freddie’s death alone acts as irrefutable testimony that, as a group, the six murdered him beyond the shadow of doubt. Knowing that only, as a group, could the six murderers possibly be found guilty, the decision to try them separately made it a foregone conclusion that either, a) each would be found not guilty, b) there would be a mistrial, or c) the charges would be dropped—all of which happened. These non-guilty verdicts were intentional!
Whether tried individually or as a group, the bosses own the government. It’s their courts, cops, and congress. Even if they were tried as a group, the racist court is set up to punish workers to the max and let police off the hook, and this case is a perfect example.
The same set-up was present in the sham trial of George Zimmerman in 2012, the wanna-be cop who shot and killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida simply because Trayvon was walking home while Black in Zimmerman’s neighborhood. When Zimmerman called 911 they told him to back off, but he refused to do so, instead confronting and killing Trayvon. There were no (live) witnesses so self-defense could not be disproven. Self-defense grants immunity to many killers. Instead of trying to keep the level of self-defense suitable to the intensity of the threat, which could be as little as a misinterpreted look, the law permits escalation to the maximum response: homicide.
Capitalist Justice: Cops Innocent, Workers Guilty
The U.S. injustice system is as fair as a loaded die. Workers are always presumed guilty while police are always innocent, even after proven guilty. These exonerations say to Black and white workers that Black workers can expect to be killed with impunity, and it says to cops, go ahead and keep killing Black workers, and we will do our best to keep you from being found guilty. According to the Washington Post’s national database, police terrorize and kill twice as many white workers as Black workers in numbers, though Black workers are killed at a disproportionate rate because of racism. These murders are a necessary part of capitalism; they keep workers afraid to fight back against exploitation and oppression. This injustice must be shut down by mass action by an outraged working class, both Black and white, along with all other workers, and replaced by a communist system run by workers in which justice is possible.
