The racist police murders of Pedro Villanueva, Delrawn Small, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile—on four consecutive days in July—are not isolated incidents or the work of a few “bad cops.” They are all too typical atrocities that expose the true face of capitalism. And they show the working class a glimpse of the heightened racist violence and bigger imperialist wars coming our way.
Capitalism cannot be reformed, nor can it be stopped by a lone wolf sniper firing into a crowd. The Progressive Labor Party fights to eliminate cops and imperialism for all time by destroying capitalism with mass revolutionary violence—with communist revolution.
The road to revolution is long and challenging. But the militant response to the latest wave of killings by cops, in demonstrations from Britain and Canada to New York and Los Angeles, shows that the capitalists haven’t terrorized the international working class into submission. In the German capital of Berlin, more than 120 police were injured in what authorities called “the most aggressive and violent protests in the last five years” (cbsnews.com, 7/10). Workers around the world are once again inspiring millions by fighting back!
Workers’ Response to KKKop Terror: Fight Back!
On Saturday, July 9, 50 members of the Progressive Labor Party led a march from the intersection of Church and Nostrand Avenues in Flatbush, a Black working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn (see photo). PLP has had a presence here for three decades. With chants of “Shut this racist system down!” and “Asian, Latin, Black and white, workers of the world unite,” the multiracial group of communists and friends shut down traffic and marched through an annual street fair on Flatbush Avenue.
Along the way, Black workers raised fists and chanted with us; 50 workers joined the march at various points. PL’ers sold 500 CHALLENGEs and distributed 1,000 leaflets calling for fightback against racist police terror with communist revolution. Even after we ran out of literature halfway through the march, workers continued to approach us to exchange contact information and find out more about us.
Taking the Streets of Manhattan
On Thursday, July 7, thousands of multiracial workers and youth angrily marched out of Union Square at a Black Lives Matter-led rally and took the streets of Manhattan. Chanting “Shut it down!”, they blocked busy streets and snarled miles of traffic. PL’ers sold hundreds of CHALLENGEs and led revolutionary chants, as hundreds of youth pounded on car windows and frustrated cops’ attempts to direct and control the demonstrators.
Workers’ Anger Turning Up Against Killer NYPD KKKop
On July 4, an off-duty New York Police Department officer murdered 37 year-old Black man Delrawn Small at a Brooklyn traffic stop. Videos taken by bystanders show the unarmed Delrawn approaching the vehicle and being immediately shot in the head and chest, contradicting the cop’s claim that Delrawn punched him in the face through the car window. Delrawn’s girlfriend and two children witnessed the cold-blooded killing.
On July 5, dozens of community and family members rallied at the intersection where he was killed. After a pacifying lecture by liberal Black misleader Charles Barron, a New York State assemblyman, the workers and youth heard a militant and heartfelt speech from Small’s brother. Then the crowd—including a multiracial PLP group—took the street in a rally originally organized by Barron with the NYPD’s blessing. But the event soon spun out of this class traitor’s control, as Black and Latin workers and youth aimed their anger at the cops gathered around them. Barron appealed for calm and blamed the protesters for “having their own agenda.” One PL’er called out to Barron, “What about YOUR agenda?”, prompting some laughter from the Smalls family.
Liberal politicians like Barron are wolves in sheep’s clothing. The bosses use them to calm workers’ justified rage and channel it into the bosses’ electoral circus. PL’ers sold CHALLENGEs, made contact with members of the Small family, and have followed up with home visits. Our aim is to unmask the danger posed by liberal snakes like Barron, and to build a mass anti-racist movement against these killer police.
Bosses Need Racist Police Terror
From the U.S. and Mexico to Russia and China, the role of law enforcement in all capitalist countries is to protect private property and suppress the one force that can bring this racist system down: the working class. Meanwhile, the job of the rulers’ politicians is to deceive us with the patently false idea that workers and the bosses’ cops are on the same side and want the same things. President Barack Obama made this message clear at the memorial for the five cops killed in Dallas, Texas: “I see what’s possible when we recognize that we are one American family, all deserving of equal treatment.” The apologist-in-chief skirted the fact that equal treatment is a fantasy in a capitalist country founded in genocide, built by slave labor, and sustained by racist inequalities in every aspect of life.
The misleaders who push identity politics and Black nationalist ideology divide us by misdirecting the blame for racism on white workers. The true problem of the international working class is capitalism, a system organized to generate profits for the few at the expense of the needs of the masses. Capitalism creates the divisive ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism. Capitalism feeds on super-profits from its super-exploitation of Black, Latin, immigrant and women workers. Capitalism leads inevitably to imperialist war, as rival national ruling classes compete for global control over resources, markets and cheaper labor.
Modern U.S. police departments evolved out of early U.S. history, when wealthy landowners funded groups of fugitive slave-catchers. Later, these “law enforcement” officers collaborated with Ku Klux Klan chapters in terrorizing Black worker and keeping them divided from their white and immigrant working-class sisters and brothers through the corrosive pathology of racism.
But the bosses are confronted with a huge contradiction. On the one hand, they need racist police terror to keep the masses in check; on the other, they need these same Black and Latin youth to fight in their unending imperialist wars. While liberals like Obama push all-class unity (a hallmark of rising fascism) and try to limit police violence, gutter racists continue to murder our sisters and brothers in the street.
The bosses can never resolve their contradiction. The job of communists and friends of PLP is to sharpen the contradiction—and ultimately to smash the bosses—by winning workers to fight back in multiracial unity.
Racism, Nationalism Justify Imperialist Wars
Racist state terror in the U.S. can only intensify as the U.S. capitalist class drives toward wider imperialist wars with their Russian and Chinese imperialist rivals. The U.S. and Chinese bosses are in stiff competition over control of the South China Sea and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as economic supremacy in Latin America.
U.S. and Russian imperialists—along with their respective proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran—are vying for control over the oil-rich Middle East and strategically vital Central Asia. With each step closer to a global war, the bosses need more intensive racism—against Muslims and immigrants as well as Black and Latin workers—to divide and intimidate the working class, and to justify mass imperialist slaughter.
Revolution, Not Fake “Solutions”
According to the Mapping Police Violence project, U.S. cops killed at least 346 Black people in 2015—nearly one per day. Black people are more than three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and Black victims are more than 50 percent more likely to be unarmed. Of the 102 cases (and probably more) where unarmed Black people were killed by cops in 2015, only ten resulted in an officer being charged with a crime. Only two cases resulted in cops being convicted, and only one led to a cop serving significant jail time.
Systemic racism is evident in both the statistics and the nature of these murders. On July 3, for just one example, nineteen-year-old Pedro Villanueva was wantonly gunned down in his pickup truck after a high-speed chase by highway patrolmen in an unmarked car in Fullerton, California. Villanueva’s alleged crime: showing off his driving skills in a parking lot “sideshow” (Los Angeles Times, 7/5). “Friends of Villanueva questioned the officers’ decision to follow the teenager with an unmarked car, contending that he may not have known he was being pursued by police, but rather feared he was being robbed on the dead-end street” (L.A. Times, 7/6).
These recent racist killings expose the futility and emptiness of reform measures—body cameras, “community policing,” sensitivity training and the rest. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was murdered as the pigs pinned him to the ground, the police department claims that both of the kkkops’ mandated body cameras had coincidentally “fallen off.”
Nor does it do the working class any good to have more police look like their victims. Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who murdered Philando Castile at a suburban Minneapolis traffic stop, is Latin. Three of the kkkops who faced criminal charges for killing Freddie Gray in Baltimore were Black. Twenty of the 68 police chiefs in the Major Cities Chiefs Association are Black (New York Times, 7/11), yet modern-day lynchings by cops continue unabated. A “diversified” police force is still a racist police force.
PLP: For Mass Revolutionary Violence
When 25-year old former Army Reservist Micah Johnson killed five cops at the Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas, he made the work of anti-racists and revolutionaries that much harder. Apparently set off by by the racist police killings of Sterling and Castile, Johnson retreated into individualism and adventurism when he shot the police. In the end, he was murdered by a police drone on wheels—executed without a trial, like so many Black workers in the U.S.
Johnson was reportedly a former member of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), a fringe group that represents nationalism at its worst. Preying on Black workers’ frustration, the group’s leaders target white workers, and Jewish workers in particular, with vile and open racism. Johnson’ outlook was no doubt formed by capitalism’s daily racism, by the trauma of serving in the rulers’ imperialist war in Afghanistan, and by the toxic ideology of the likes of the NBPP. He was driven to mental illness and suicide-by-cop. To the extent that nationalist groups succeed in dividing our class, they help only the bosses. They are a reactionary, anti-revolutionary element
PLP organizes within the bosses’ military to build a mass movement for communism to seize state power and smash the dictatorship of the capitalists. Our strategy means struggling with masses of workers in the military to fight for our international class and turn the guns around—to turn imperialist war into class war for revolution.
Build A Fighting PLP!
Workers are fighting back, and our Party is in the thick of the struggle. Workers rebelled after the July 5 police murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. As we go to press, women-led PLP fighters are marching alongside rebelling workers there (see page ?).
On Sunday, July 10, the day the NYPD shot and injured yet another Black man in Flatbush, Paul Mathurin, Black, white and Latin PL’ers talked with community members, sold CHALLENGEs and made contacts. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Mathurin and refused to believe the bosses’ lies that he was waving a gun. The struggle to unite our class advances every day.
The worldwide working class, led by Progressive Labor Party, must persevere to build a mass, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement. We must struggle against frustration and cynicism. We must stay the course with both communist urgency and communist patience. There are no shortcuts to revolution.
The bosses will never give up state power voluntarily. We need millions to join us worldwide and take it from them. Join PLP, and fight back!
BATON ROUGE, LA, JULY 10—After Alton Sterling was murdered by the kkkops, Black workers carried out nightly protests. When the Progressive Labor Party heard this, we mobilized a multiracial group mainly women to go to Baton Rouge. Women, among them mothers who left child-rearing duties with their husbands, led the PLP group. The goal was to learn from our working class sisters and brothers and instill revolutionary communist politics into the fightback.
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 kkkops who murdered Sterling were doing their jobs under capitalism: serving the bosses and terrorizing the working class.
Black workers in Louisiana, as elsewhere, feel the cutting edge of racism the deepest. The state of Louisiana has the third highest unemployment rate in the U.S.
Baton Rouge, the state capitol, 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 official poverty line, and where Black men had a 46 percent high school graduation rate (New York Times, 7/11/16). New Orleans, only less than two hours away, is where in 2005, the capitalist disaster Hurricane Katrina and Rita sideswiped the city, and the bosses abandoned over 100,000 Black workers in New Orleans, murdering over 1,000.
Workers, Youth, Reds Turn Up
PLP joined a demonstration at steps of the state capital building. A multiracial crowd of over 1,000 workers was quietly listening to prayers and speeches given by a church group. PL’ers led chants on the bullhorn as the crowd began marching. The responses chants and CHALLENGE newspaper sales were militant and enthusiastic. Within minutes, the PL’ers became the leadership of the whole march.
A teenage girl asked if she could be on the mic. She then led us in chanting, “No justice, no peace! No racist police!” The unity of the workers and their anger were palpable.
One Black woman worker, infected by identity politics, told a white woman PL’er she shouldn’t lead the chants. The comrade responded by arguing for multiracial unity—this fight belongs to the whole working class. This Black worker insisted there were “already too many white people.”
But the other Black workers in the crowd weren’t having it—they told the comrade not to ignore the nationalist. Everyone continued chanting, “Black and white—shut it down, Asian and Latin—shut it down, woman and men, shut it down, with multi-racial unity—shut it down! The PL’er was judged and respected by her antiracist politics, not her skin color.
Misleaders Pacify, Reds Electrify Workers
The deadly trap of identity politics, especially Black Nationalism, is robust in the boss-funded Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—liberal white billionaire George Soros, best known for exporting capitalist “democracy” and diverting workers’ fightback into support for U.S. imperialism, has gifted BLM with millions of dollars (Washington Times, 1/24/15). Black nationalism serve the bosses by blaming white workers for capitalism’s racist horror house, instead of instead of fighting the bosses and building for revolution.
Consider the mass leadership provided by multiracial mainly-women communists in Baton Rouge. When boss-serving misleaders aimed to pacify workers and remain in a church parking lot, a vocal PLP Black woman worker on the bullhorn electrified the crowd and inspired them to take to the streets.
They took the streets and ran up against cops with guns and riot gear. A local worker called the PL’ers to warn of the police’s plan to use tear gas. Since this particular balance of forces wasn’t in the workers’ favor, PLP and friends tactically retreated, warned the crowd of the cops, and regrouped.
The police drove a car into the remaining crowd and separated it. They made arrests, grabbing people by the necks and throwing some over fences.
Cops know how to take advantage of a disorganized march. PLP was able to sharpen the politics of the workers’ anger. Comrades and friends work collectively to sharpen the fight. But, PL’ers also followed the leadership of workers.
The identity politics of groups like BLM purposefully drive a wedge in working class unity, while drawing in many honest antiracist workers and youth. PLP fights for the international working class to unite under communist leadership and smash this racist profit system.
From Baton Rouge To Every Continent: Build A Mass PLP!
In Baton Rouge, and in 27 countries, PLP is learning to fight and fighting to learn to build a mass communist movement to seize state power. The workers of Baton Rouge are angry and fed up. They are angry and frustrated with this racist system and its lack of jobs, its closings of schools and hospitals, and its unending police terror. They want real leadership and are open to communism. Although they are calling for the firing of the police chief and mayor, many understand that whoever takes over will continue to oversee racist terror on our class. Many also see past the nationalist lies that putting more Black people in ruling-class positions will improve the conditions of Black workers. Baton Rouge’s mayor, Kip Holden, is Black and as many workers in Baton Rouge put it, “he is nowhere to be seen.”
Workers can learn many lessons during these increasing surges of class struggle as the capitalist system exposes its inherently racist and violent nature. The bosses use their state power to exploit workers for profits, super-exploit some with racist terror, and send the workers’ youth to fight in imperialist wars. It is the job of communists to build international working class consciousness. In fighting back, the working class gains confidence that it can build a communist society based on the needs of the working class. From Baton Rouge to every continent: JOIN PLP!
Over two weeks in July three major U.S. ruling-class organizations are mounting watershed conventions: the American Federation of Teachers, the Republican National Committee, and the Democratic National Committee. Each represents a ruling-class effort to build a nationalist, racist consensus around the attacks in store for workers and their children in the months and years to come.
The rebels of Ferguson and Baltimore, and now Baton Rouge and St. Paul, have shown the international working class that we have better options than voting and passivity. Militant striking teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, risking their lives to fight for schools their students deserve, point us to another way. Members of Progressive Labor Party are active in these struggles and more, and our call is clear: Workers of the world, unite and fight for communism!
What can the rulers offer our class? Nothing! Instability and terror grip the Middle East (see editorial, page 2). Russian imperialism squares off against NATO in Europe, with both sides resorting to an aggressive nuclear weapon “deterrence” policy last seen during the Cold War. Chinese imperialism makes the shipping lanes of the South China Sea a flashpoint for potential global conflict.
In the wake of racist police murders in Minnesota, Louisiana, Brooklyn and beyond; in light of the swift death U.S. imperialism brings to workers in the Muslim world and the slow death capitalism means for billions across the globe, PLP makes this call to attendees and opposition forces in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Philadelphia:
NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL!
DISRUPT BOSSES’ CONVENTIONS!
DON’T VOTE, REVOLT!
*****
DNC: Dump Clinton
Hillary and Bill Clinton and their allies have fronted for the capitalist bosses’ war on the international working class for two decades. Hillary was her husband’s working partner during his viciously anti-worker administration of the 1990s. (As she once famously said, “We are the president.”) She was an especially vocal advocate for the sexist, racist welfare reform that threw millions of people—disproportionately Black mothers and children—into extreme poverty.
Hillary Clinton also backed the 1994 crime bill, including the “three strikes” rule, that paved the way for mass racist incarceration and expanded the prison industrial complex for privatized slave labor. She dehumanized Black youth in gangs as “super-predators” with “no conscience, no empathy…we have to bring them to heel.” The 100,000 additional cops who flooded U.S. city streets, another provision of the Clinton crime bill, were trained as an occupying army. The recent wave of racist murders by police—lynchings by any other name—are the fruit of that legislation.
Through sanctions and indiscriminate bombings of Iraq, the Clintons slaughtered 500,000 Iraqi children. As U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton enthusiastically backed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to shore up US control over Middle Eastern oil, killing hundreds of thousands more civilians in the process. As Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, she took a lead role in engineering attacks on civilians in Libya and the coup in Honduras that helped make it the murder capital of the world. Now she is leading the charge for a more aggressive U.S. intervention in Syria, a conflict that has already killed hundreds of thousands and left millions on the run.
While Clinton is finance capital’s favored candidate, her bottomless greed and arrogant recklessness are making the bosses nervous. The State Department email scandal—and an ensuing front-page reprimand in the New York Times, the premier capitalist mouthpiece—manifests a grave problem for the ruling class. Clinton inspires so little trust that she may be unable to garner mass support for the wider war U.S. rulers are counting on to save their shaky empire.
Now that Bernie Sanders has capped his “political revolution” by endorsing an arch-imperialist and Wall Street insider, his role as a cynical misleader of honest workers and youth may be nearing an end. In the ultimate exercise of “lesser evil” politics, he’s now asking his followers to trust the liberal bosses to defeat Donald Trump’s gutter racism.
But voting will never smash racism. Nothing short of a communist revolution can accomplish that essential task.
*****
AFT: Teachers, Take the Streets!
In this brutally unequal system, teachers are expected to play a stabilizing role. They are directed to prepare future workers, soldiers and inmates for the U.S. ruling class to use and discard in their drive for maximum profit and imperialist dominion.
When Hillary Clinton visits Minneapolis for the AFT Convention, don’t stand and cheer for an imperialist butcher! Don’t applaud an architect of mass racist incarceration! Teachers must stand with Diamond Reynolds, whose fiancé, Philando Castile, was executed before her eyes—and with her four-year-old daughter in the car’s back seat. We must WALK OUT when Hillary takes the stage and join local protests against racism.
Beginning in 2002, Philando was a cafeteria worker in the St. Paul public schools. He was a strong and positive force in his school community, knowing all 530 students at J.J. Hill Montessori School by name and their particular dietary needs (Vox, 7/8). This is the workingman taken from us. There can be NO BUSINESS AS USUAL in the face of racist police murder.
Meanwhile, the AFT leadership has been complicit in a decades-long pattern of deepening segregation. In 2010, union president Randi Weingarten embraced Bill Gates, the apostle of a charter school movement that has intensified this segregation. Recently, the AFT has signed on to data-driven education reforms that ramp up stress and stigma for students, parents and teachers alike.
While union hacks have devised increasingly elaborate stratagems to sell out students and teachers to reformist billionaires, education workers in PLP have taken up the task of organizing parents, students and teachers to turn racist attacks on our schools into their opposite. An injury to one is an injury to all! We are building the multiracial unity we will need to unite the working class and overthrow capitalism—the source of our exploitation—once and for all. We seek to sustain the communist traditions pioneered by Cuban masses who, in 1961, suspended high school and fanned out to the countryside to defeat illiteracy. Or the Chinese youth who, in 1966, launched a Cultural Revolution (later betrayed by Mao) to push their society forward to communism. Or the Bolsheviks who smashed sexist prohibitions against women’s access to basic and higher education after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
More of the same isn’t working; we need communism! AFT delegates: Keep an eye out for CHALLENGE supplements, and check www.plp.org. We need your help in distributing our literature among your colleagues back home.
*****
RNC: It’s Capitalism’s Fault
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, is blatantly racist and sexist. He is the favored candidate of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi sympathizers the world over, from Louisiana’s David Duke to France’s Marine Le Pen.
Disaffected workers misled by Trump are being pitted against Black, Latin, Muslim and immigrant workers. These divisions are pervasive in the U.S., from education to housing to employment. (See antiracistbattle at Trump fundraiser on page 3).
Trump’s gutter politics flow naturally from a long history of racist policies and pronouncements by both Republicans and Democrats. They date back to the Declaration of Independence—a document, as a scholar of American history recently noted in the New York Times, that voiced the Founding Fathers’ fears of rebellious Black slaves and “merciless Indian savages.” Voting against Trump does nothing to challenge or disrupt that history.
The finance capital bosses whom both Trump and Hillary Clinton represent—ExxonMobil, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase—use their media to keep workers invested in a bought-and-paid-for political process. If anything, Trump has helped the main wing of the
ruling class by marginalizing the Tea Party movement and more domestic-oriented
capitalists like the Koch Brothers.
Taking heed of Trump’s volatility, which could be bad for business, the bosses’ newspapers, websites and talking heads are doing all they can to lead anti-racist workers into the arms of Hillary Clinton. But a vote for either of these candidates stands in absolute contradiction to workers’ class interests.
Fortunately, we have a better choice than dead-end electoral politics: mass anti-racist class struggle and the Progressive Labor Party.
*****
The surprising success of Trump and Sanders reflects workers’ outrage at perpetual mass unemployment and the grotesque inequalities of U.S. capitalism. Meanwhile, AFT members are left to pick up the pieces of a devastated society in segregated, overcrowded, underfunded urban schools. Capitalism is a proven failure, and all workers—and their innocent children—pay the price.
The DNC and RNC are both controlled by the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. Their conventions are rigged to select presidential candidates who will be willing and able to lead the U.S. into global inter-imperialist war. Teachers are expected to push nationalist ideology while staffing an educational apparatus that sorts children into a small group with a future and a larger group without one. If teachers fail to fight back against the racist, anti-child, anti-worker agenda of the Weingarten leadership, conditions can only get worse.
Our opportunity to break with these misleaders is ever present. We must seize the time! Our class needs communism, a classless society. Our class needs leaders like the teacher-rebels in Oaxaca, not the warmongers, racists and illusion-peddlers who will top the Democratic and Republican party tickets this fall.
Join PLP to unite with a movement that will liberate the working class once and for all from capitalist exploitation and war.
- Information
No Trump, No Clinton, The Whole Damn System’s Gotta Go
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- 15 July 2016 69 hits
TEXAS, June 17—Communists led hundreds of workers at an anti-Trump protest outside a country club fundraiser to form a picket line and confront the cops, homeland security, and their liberal racist collaborators.
PLP took aim to expose both Trump and the Democratic Party as the anti-working class tools of the ruling class that they are. Both had scheduled major events here in the same week, and we kicked off our summer project to take them on.
For Trump’s fundraiser, we wrote a leaflet and members of our base translated it. It called on workers to “Defend Our Immigrant Brothers and Sisters” and to fight back against the racist terror of both Trump and Clinton. It connected the role of inter-imperialist rivalries with the bosses’ escalation of racism. We attacked Trump’s overt anti-immigrant racism and Clinton’s record of genocidal war in the Middle East.
At the protest, police cordoned off an area with barricades for the anti-Trump rally. About 500 protesters lined the barricade waiting for Trump to arrive. As the crowd stood waiting, our group of PL’ers and friends turned the event into a march. We organized a picket line and began marching back and forth behind the barricade. While the liberal misleaders chanted “Dump Trump!” we influenced the entire rally with our chants of “No Borders, No Nations, No Racist Deportations!” and “Hillary, Trump All the Same, Racist Terror is the Name of Their Game!” As we marched we got out hundreds more leaflets.
Racists, Go Home!
Minutes after Trump’s motorcade arrived, a group of Trump supporters crossed the street and taunted the protesters. At the front of the area where the confrontation started, our group began leading a chant of “Racists Go Home, Racists Go Home!” Dozens of protesters rallied behind us as we pressed forward to confront the racists. We were ready for a fight and so were scores of protesters behind us.
Revealing their true face, the liberal “peacekeepers,” who had been trained by the liberal misleaders to act as police-collaborators to prevent protester fightback, rushed in to form a barrier between Trump’s racist supporters and us. The “peacekeepers” formed a barrier in order to protect the Trump supporters from us, yelling for us to “move back!”
City police and Homeland Security cops stood behind the “peacekeepers” as they watched the liberals do their job for them.
Eventually the racists backed off. The “peacekeepers” kept yelling for us to “move back!” but we continued to chant with the masses who had surrounded us: “Deportations mean, we got to fight back! Racism means, we got to fight back!” The entire confrontation only lasted a few minutes but it showed us a glimpse of what is possible with PL’s leadership.
Organizing is Key
Our strength in leading the fightback stemmed from our organizing effort leading up to the event. We leafleted around town for days, calling on workers to join us in confronting Trump. We talked to nurses, doctors and construction workers in the medical center area where Trump was scheduled to speak. Some took stacks of leaflets to hand out to co-workers inside the hospitals.
We got out hundreds more leaflets in parts of the city with concentrations of immigrant and Black workers. Our message of multiracial unity with immigrants under attack by racist politicians was well received and many workers pledged to attend the protest.
Trump, Clinton, Two Faces of The Same Coin
The day following the Trump event, the Democratic Party was wrapping up it’s state convention downtown. We and canvassed the area and convention hall, handing out hundreds, and had lots of good conversation with workers. Though the majority were Clinton supporters, many gladly took the leaflet, acknowledging that they support her because they feel she is the lesser evil compared to Trump (see more about Clinton on page 8).
Many may still vote for the Democrats in the upcoming election, but we came away with a sense of greater possibility. Despite the bosses’ efforts in this election, their hold on the ideas of the working class is limited. Many workers support either candidate because they have been told the only way to fix society’s problems is by voting. But many have lost some faith in the ability of capitalist democracy to solve their problems. This is an opportunity for PLP to show the limits of what the rulers will offer and that only communism offers workers a world run for us and by us.
As we move forward this summer, we will hold schools on communist philosophy and history, at which we plan to bring our friends and contacts we’ve made throughout the summer project. Join us and stay tuned for more fightback!
MEXICO, June 13—Hundreds of teachers and other workers carried on the fight as they beat back the fascist attacks of the Mexican ruling class’s armed thugs in Oaxaca. United, workers blocked road access, burned down a police station and hotels used by snipers. The many years of the country’s militarization along with the rulers’ organized political crimes are used to oppress the working class by all three parts of the government. At the same time the electoral parties show a total submissiveness and collaboration with the police state we face. The mass movement led by the CNTE (the national teachers union) is one of the few with the strength needed to face the bosses’ attacks. It is no coincidence that the capitalist class is trying to annihilate this movement so they can advance their multimillion projects.
The police started the criminal attack against hundreds of teachers who defended themselves with sticks and rocks, putting up barricades, and blocking the road from Nochixtlan to the city of Oaxaca. Police shot at the crowds, killing more than 10 and injuring more than 50. The bosses’ henchmen thought it would be easy, but as soon as nearby workers realized what was happening, they joined the teachers to repel this criminal attack. “The longer they were there, [the] more people came to confront them, the police retreated, some of them beaten by the people,” a journalist said.
The population jumped on them and the hordes of murderous cowards retreated. Everywhere, on the way to Oaxaca, they met with workers’ resistance. That first night, the troops occupied the first square of the city of Oaxaca, but the following morning thousands of teachers and neighbors were out on the streets forcing them to retreat. The ruler’s strategy of exhaustion, discrediting the teachers in the media, and police repression did not scare the CNTE. The CNTE is stronger amongst all the teachers’ throughout Mexico. They are tired of the impunity, the corruption, the government and their genocidal politics.
The popular movement led by the CNTE is reformist—it defends labor and popular rights. While at this moment it is playing a crucial part confronting the police state, reforms of capitalism don’t work for workers. The capitalist system will never meet the basic necessities of the working class, like education, health and housing—but will reduce salaries and labor rights. The capitalists’ government’s rejection of the demands from this popular movement shows once again that capitalism has no interest in solving workers’ problems. The CNTE has a few anti-capitalist positions but it does not organize to destroy the root cause of our misery and suffering: the whole system. This is the job of communists in PLP.
The education reform the teachers are fighting against is racist privatizing of the education system and leads to the firing of thousands of teachers. It also leads to even more oppression of teachers and indigenous communities. The economic background of these reforms is that the ruling class and their imperialist partners need to destroy popular opposition in order to take large extensions of communal land in the south and center of the country. The development of projects and infrastructure will affect thousands of the indigenous population. It might be thought that the expansion of the Lázaro Cárdenas and Chiapas ports and the creation of the oil industrial corridor Coatzacoalcos-Tabasco-Campeche could bring wellbeing and improve the conditions in the region, but because of the capitalist nature of maximizing profits to compete in the imperialist market, we know that these projects will only bring evictions and dispossessions of thousands of farmers and miserable salaries.
Right now, the seven-week strike and mobilizations by the teachers and population in the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Oaxaca, has the rulers on the defensive. What they really want is to protect companies like PEMEX, Walmart, ADO, Moctezuma and others, which have been affected by the strikers’ road blockades. Osorio Chong, Government Secretary responsible for the repression in Nochixtlan, is preparing another attack in the next few hours, or days.
PLP has taken an active part in this movement, discussing and spreading the communist analysis through flyers and CHALLENGE. This mass movement gives us the opportunity to make significant advances, to develop our organizing for the communist revolution. We can win many people tired of the hellhole of capitalism. Let us take the challenge—let’s win more young workers, teachers, farmworkers, and students to the fight for a communist revolution.
