Omar Mateen’s anti-gay sexist killing in Orlando fuels the anti-Muslim racism the ruling class uses to further divide the working class.
The 49 people dead and 53 wounded at the Pulse nightclub were targets of Mateen’s hatred, possibly self-loathing, of the gay and transgender working class.
This capitalist world’s nature is to exploit, alienate, terrorize, and murder—all for maintaining profit and imperialist domination. It is no surprise then that Mateen had internalized the inner logic of this system. Capitalism seeks to alienate and sicken the way we relate to members of our class. The attack was years in the making and is supported by ages of sexist oppression and violence against the gay and transgender working class.
Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Hillary Clinton’s odious statement reveals the ruling-class sentiment: “this is the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States and it reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets” (NYT, 6/13). Surely this aspiring terrorist-in-chief isn’t referring to the “weapons of war” the Obama administration used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria, or those used by militarized kkkops on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Brooklyn.Some ruling-class media is linking Mateen with ISIS. If that is indeed the case, where does ISIS come from? ISIS is the Frankenstein’s monster of decades of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. ISIS is a murderous offshoot of al Qaeda, which the U.S. initially funded and built (“We Created Islamic Extremism,” Salon, 11/17/15). The U.S. still remains the biggest world terrorist organization, with $600 billion annual military budget.
To paraphrase Malcolm X, the U.S. bosses never foresaw that the chicken would come home to roost. While he was referring to the Kennedy Assassination—if hundreds of thousands of civilians are being killed by the imperialist war machine, like in Vietnam and today the Middle East, some will react the way Mateen did—by attacking the working class, be it ISIS or individuals like Mateen.
Workers do need to react to imperialist ruling classes around the world, but by uniting the working class—Black, Latin, Asian, white, gay, straight, men, and women—to confront and smash the bosses!
Bosses Breed Anti-Muslim Racism
The working-class youth have been fed, in addition to the vicious anti-Black racism, the fear of Muslim workers, especially since the Sept 11 attacks. Just last year, following the Paris and San Bernardino shootings the bosses’ media’s ramping up of anti-Muslim racism led to an increase in the attacks on Muslim workers and youth.
The bosses’ racism is evident in calling the Charleston church mass shooting by white racist vigilante Dylann Roof (June 2015) an act of mental illness but that of Muslim Mateen an act of ISIS-related terrorism. This racism is bred by the bosses to drive their imperialist agenda. Patriotic hatred of Arab and Muslim workers is very useful when there are oil wars to win in the Middle East.
While the bosses push the racist idea that Muslims are inherently dangerous, in fact, all religious movements are dangerous to the working class, because they all divert workers’ natural anti-capitalist anger into the false and divisive unity of nations or religious creeds. Whether Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim, from Pope Francis to the Ayatollah Khamenei, the cynical leaders of these movements work hand-in-hand with mass-murdering capitalist rulers to preserve the profit system. In the words of a gay protester at a multiracial rally including Muslims in New York City, “where was all this support when Christians were killing us?”
Regardless of where it stems from, terrorist violence is always anti-working class. The communist antidote and alternative is mass, revolutionary, working-class violence to seize power from the capitalist class and build an egalitarian, internationalist world. The Progressive Labor Party is organizing a movement to create such a world—a society run by workers to serve workers’ needs, a society without profit or wage slavery or any form of exploitation.
Individual violence can never defeat the rulers’ racism. It was the working-class masses in the Soviet Union and China and the Resistance movements that smashed the Nazi and Japanese fascists in World War II. Racism can be obliterated only by mass working-class revolutionary violence. The liberation of the gay/transgender working class is connected to the Black, Muslim, undocumented working class. Let us unite as a class! We need to organize tens of millions of workers, under the banner of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, to smash capitalism and build a worker-run society: communism.

Juneteenth has been pushed on the working class as a progressive holiday, perpetuating myths of democracy in is a holiday that’s been celebrated in Texas since 1867. The holiday grew from the fact that slaves in Texas were not told they had been emancipated until 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
This holiday echoes the elevation of Lincoln by Obama, who was sworn into office on the Lincoln Bible, in an effort to declare his election victory the antiracist culmination of a struggle to realize American “democracy” that began with the “great emancipator” and victor of the Civil War.
The push for Juneteenth serves to perpetuate two myths:
First, that U.S. capitalism and “democracy” has a history of continuous progress to eliminate racism, and,
Second, the U.S. government and U.S. presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Obama have been the true representatives of anti-racism in world history.
The goal of both of these myths is to convince the working class, especially Black workers, to support U.S. imperialism. With the U.S. fighting multiple oil wars and in the midst of an economic depression, the ruling class has continued to explain its wars of empire as efforts to spread human rights and liberties around the world. As in earlier wars of empire, the U.S. ruling class hopes to hide the reality of racism behind the image of a false hero such as Lincoln or Obama.
But we in the working class need to understand that racism is a fundamental part of capitalism. The capitalists and their politicians are the promoters and beneficiaries of racism, reaping profits, preventing rebellions with divide-and-conquer tactics, and mobilizing soldiers to fight the capitalist battles by demonizing the enemy.
Communist revolution is the only way to end racism and smash the capitalist system that invented it and promotes it.
Racism Born in The U.S.A
The first myth can be exploded by looking at the origins and reality of racism in the contemporary United States. Racism is the product of U.S. agrarian capitalism, codified in the laws of colonial Virginia, where European and African indentured laborers had a rich history of multiracial resistance to exploitation. In order to control their rebellious workforce, landowners began imposing differential punishments on Black and white servants, enacted laws to criminalize Black and white unity, and defined slave status as passing from mother to child.
By 1705, these laws defined slaves as real estate and decriminalized the killing of a slave by an owner. Black landowners were denied the right to employ white servants, and by 1722 were denied the right to vote. This was a decision justified by the governor of Virginia as necessary to “fix a perpetual Brand on Negroes” in order to secure the institution of slavery. After independence, the U.S. Constitution protected slavery as a “domestic institution” of the member states. The fugitive slave clause and the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850 required the federal government and all citizens to chase down and return runaway slaves, a law defied by the many white and Black abolitionists who participated in the Underground Railroad.
acism had been born as a material source of super-exploitation and as the key ideology of capitalism. It would spread around the world from this point as each capitalist country defined some group—Black, Latin, immigrant—and developed new racial theories to justify super-exploitation and to divide and conquer the working class. Despite all the hype about a Black president, racist super-exploitation is the name of the game around the world. All workers are exploited, paid only enough to reproduce themselves as a labor force, but Black and Latin workers are exploited even more viciously.
The material reality of racism is manifest in unemployment figures. Official unemployment in the U.S. is 15 million people, which doesn’t include another 15 million who can’t find a full-time job or have given up looking. In April 2010, the official unemployment rate was 8.8percent for white, 16.5 percent for Black, and 12.6 percent for Latin. This itself doesn’t tell the whole truth, since the unemployment rate for Black men in many cities like Detroit is nearly 50 percent. And racism is getting worse. In 1974 median Black incomes were 73 percent of those of white families. In 2004, a typical Black family had an income of 54 percent of a white family.
Racism Hurts ALL Workers
Racism drags down the wages of all workers, and this is clearest in the former slave states where wages for Black, white and Latin workers continue to be the lowest in the nation. For example, Boeing opened a new plant in South Carolina with hopes to lure even more Boeing production by offering low wages, no unions, and more importantly a low level of labor militancy.
Ultimately, domestic exploitation will only take capitalism so far. The bosses understand that the top-dog capitalists will be determined on the global stage, through inter-imperialist war. In the past two decades, anti-Muslim racism has been a key component of the bosses’ war strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Pakistan to Yemen. This enables them to kill and maim millions throughout the Middle East with little to no protest. U.S. soldiers are fueled by the anti-Muslim racism promoted by military officers and carry out racist laws passed on the floor of Congress that target Arabs and other immigrant groups specifically and workers in general.
Presidents from Lincoln to Obama understand the necessity of racism to maximize profits and to prevent workers from uniting against capitalism. They also understand that workers must be convinced to rally around the nation’s flag for capitalist and imperialist war. History becomes an important weapon in how the bosses convince workers to fight for capitalism instead of in their own class interests.
Juneteenth Hides Truth of Lincoln’s Racist Union ‘Victory’
So how do they convince us to put up with this? Part of the story is to convince us that the politicians and the government are the key forces for change, and that other workers are the enemy or powerless. Here Juneteenth and similar holidays play a role by hiding the true history of the end of slavery: that it came as a result of the struggles of Black and white workers, not through the actions of the racist Abraham Lincoln.
When the Civil War began, Lincoln’s goal was to maintain the Union for the capitalist class, not to abolish slavery or to eliminate racism. Lincoln was an open racist who declared, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about the social and political equality of the white and Black races.” As the Civil War began in 1861, Lincoln advocated “colonizing” Black people in Africa and Central America; supported a constitutional amendment protecting slavery where it already existed; refused to enlist them into the army; and ordered continued enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act which required all citizens to return runaway slaves to their masters.
But as more enslaved Black workers fled to Union lines, many Union soldiers refused to return them to their owners, and some generals attempted to abolish slavery in the occupied slave territories. Over Lincoln’s objections, Congress passed laws that confiscated slaves (property) of Confederate owners and used them as Union soldiers, but still in bondage. In September 1862, Lincoln adopted partial emancipation as a diplomatic and military tactic. In the Emancipation Proclamation, he requested that Congress appropriate funds for the deportation of freed slaves and announced that slaves in any states that continued to rebel would be freed on January 1, 1863.
This proclamation by itself freed no one. Slaves in Maryland, Delaware, Missouri or Kentucky, slave states that were loyal to the union, were not covered. Slavery was not abolished there until the ratification of the 13th amendment in December 1865, six months after Juneteenth. The proclamation could be enforced in the eleven rebellious Confederate states only if and when the Union Army arrived.
The real Liberators of Slaves
The real fight against slavery came from hundreds of slave revolts that had destabilized the system from the inside. The most famous of these are:
The Haitian rebellions that eliminated slavery and drove the French from the island in 1804
The rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831
The 1859 John Brown and Harriet Tubman attack on the Marine armory at Harper’s Ferry, a military effort by Black and white abolitionists, which forced millions to realize that pacifism would not end slavery. Dring the Civil War, 180,000 slaves took up arms and joined the fight against their masters whenever the Union army neared. And in the Mississippi Valley, two-thirds of the Union army was Black, half of whom were former slaves. Others took over abandoned plantations, and divided the land among themselves. All of this worried capitalist politicians, including Lincoln, who in April 1865 was scheming to remove former Black soldiers from the nation because he feared that these disciplined men would mount a “guerilla war” against their former owners.
Fighting Racism
There is a third story hidden within the myths of U.S. anti-racism: the story of multiracial unity and fight-back, and the fact that racism has to be constantly reinvented to prevent the potential power of a unified working class. Many CHALLENGE readers are familiar with the multiracial unity of antiracist fighters like John Brown and the Black-white unity of the 1892 New Orleans general strike. This kind of action was a constant undercurrent.
o example, in Galveston, TX, in the 1840s-60s the common everyday experience of poor white dockworkers and enslaved Black workers overshadowed their racial “differences.” Despite the efforts of the city government to prevent mixing of Black and white workers, many rejected the bosses’ racism and saw themselves as part of the same exploited class.
Other examples suggest that rather than celebrating the bosses’ Juneteenth holiday, workers should celebrate our own Juneteenth. On June 14, 1919 nearly one hundred white lumber workers in Bogalusa, LA armed themselves to defend Black workers from company threats against unionizing. In unity, armed white workers safely escorted the Black workers from their homes to a union meeting. Several white workers were killed defending a Black worker and union activist who was on the run from company thugs trying to kill him.
These stories highlight the potential for multiracial unity among workers once we realize our common class interest. We must take inspiration from these examples but also recognize the limits. These battles focused mainly on efforts to unite workers across racial lines, but lacking a communist analysis, failed to attack the capitalist system that perpetuates and enforces racism.
The bosses keep racism alive in the 21st century, using holidays such as Juneteenth to keep workers divided, while hiding the story of working-class unity and fight-back. Antiracist unity poses one of the greatest threats to the bosses. Both Lincoln and Obama and every president in between understood this fact. Fighting racism is a key task for communists and the working class today. We must seize upon the history of our predecessors and build a multiracial fighting party, the PLP, to smash the racist system of capitalism once and for all.

Hillary Clinton is the presumed Democratic nominee, has won the final primary in D.C, and has been officially endorsed by Obama, signaling dominant finance capitalists’ current choice for the next imperialist-in-chief. President Obama has also made it clear to the immobilized candidate Bernie Sanders of his role to bring more young people into the electoral process and build inner party unity for coming war and fascism.
CHALLENGE has been exposing each candidate’s ruling-class ties. For the past several months, PLP has been reporting on this political circus, pointing to the question “how can the bosses fool the working class into supporting the racist, sexist, imperialist system?” The answer: preparing the working class to vote for a candidate like Hillary Clinton. There is no such thing as a good choice for the working class among these candidates—every last one of them will do everything to keep capitalism alive and well, and the workers need communism to lead a world run by and for our class.
Bern Capitalist Illusions
Sanders plays an important role of the “hopeful” candidate who could shine some light on all the oppression we feel through our daily lives. He is someone who talks about mass unemployment, someone who gives the appearance of wanting to protect the working class. He tapped into the mass disgruntlement of the working class, and leading us into the voting booths and out of the streets.  His campaign feeds workers the illusion of progress and democracy, a centuries-old myth of U.S. capitalism (see article on page 6). Without communist politics and fightback, any anti-racist, anti-sexist, egalitarian-based ideas will be funneled to sustain capitalism.
Make no mistake—Sanders bowing out of the race is not a loss for the working class. Sanders is as much of an imperialist as Obama. He backed every action Obama made during the war in Syria and Afghanistan that killed thousands, and has an even longer history of supporting U.S. imperialist wars. Thanks to Sanders, many otherwise disillusioned people are buying into reform, and eventually fascism. Sanders and Clinton strive to build all-class unity, something they desperately need to challenge arch imperialist rivals like China and Russia.
Then there is Trump—a candidate who uses workers’ anger about the lack of jobs and poor economy to win them to a dangerous and anti-working class racist, sexist line, and is a beacon for racists to rally behind. He will cause millions of other workers to vote for Clinton, to make sure Trump doesn’t win.
We’re With the Working Class
Clinton—not the most openly gutter racist but her policies have done nothing but kill, starve, imprison, and deport Black and Latin workers in the U.S. and overseas. As fear of Trump continues to build, many workers will be misled into believing that the “better” choice is warmonger Clinton. Many pledge to be “with her,” Clinton’s campaign catchphrase that aims to exploit the working class’s anti-sexist instincts.
No matter the candidate, each it selling its own brand of patriotism. Progressive Labor Party rejects this war-fervor tactic. We are not with her, or him. We are with the international working class.
But there is only one choice for the working class that will smash this exploitative capitalist system for good. Masses of workers must unite—Asian, Latin, Black, white, men, women, young, and old—to fight for a communist revolution!

Greetings to Unitarian Universalists gathered at the 2016 General Assembly in Columbus, Ohio.
Unitarian Universalists congregants, including the communist Progressive Labor Party members, in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, CA, and Brooklyn, NY, among others, have joined some mass, militant, and multiracial fightbacks to protest the kkkop murders of Black and Latin workers. The upsurge in participation in these movements is partly the result communists and CHALLENGE urging  UU congregants to be beacons of antiracism and proponents of a communist world under the leadership of PLP.
Fighting Back in CALI
 In Santa Monica, CA. our Peace & Social Justice Committee organized marches in August, September, and October to demand justice for three men murdered in Venice, CA. Brendon Glenn and Jason Davis were killed by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) kkkops; Jamal Lee Warren by a beachfront hotel owner and his security guard. After Glenn was killed May 5, 2015, hundreds of people voiced their anger at a town hall meeting, but nothing followed. We reached out to local anti-racist organizations and advocacy groups for homeless people, as well as to our friends at First UU LA, to join our protest marches on Venice Beach.
At the marches, we demanded the police release a security-camera video showing how Glenn was killed. LAPD police chief Beck says the video shows that Glenn, who was unarmed, was shot in the back by kkkop Clifford Proctor while lying on in the street. In an effort to pacify protestors Beck recommended that LA District Attorney Jackie Lacey prosecute Clifford Proctor, the LAPD cop that killed Glenn. Unsurprisingly Lacey claims she is “still investigating.” We can’t get justice under capitalism, but we are determined to not let Glenn and others die in vain. We have initiated a petition campaign to demand that Lacey prosecute Proctor, and we plan to demonstrate at her office.
In addition to participating in the marches in Venice, our People’s Liberation Unitarian Universalist Group held a march that included UUs from Santa Monica in November through our church’s neighborhood, Koreatown. This march was held a few days after the one-year anniversary of the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, MO kkkop who killed Michael Brown. Our chants were militant, echoing our will to keep on fighting in the face of capitalist oppression against our brothers and sisters. One of our chants was, “Mike Brown means...Fight back! Omar Abrego means...Fight back! Kyam Livingston means... Fight back!”  And fight back we will!
At a potluck dinner after the march we discussed how to further the movement against racist actions by police. A forum at First Church on the history of policing in the U.S. grew out of that discussion. This forum was a step in the right direction in understanding how policing has and will always benefited the capitalist class.
Combined action by Santa Monica and LA UUs was one impetus toward the founding of a countywide UU social justice group, jUUstice LA. We are pushing for jUUstice LA to make the fight to indict Brendon Glenn a focus for all 12 UU congregations in LA County. At the First UU, we’ve agreed to make the struggle around Brendon Glenn a key part of our work; we are making weekly speeches with our candle-of-hope ritual.
The Struggle Continues in Brooklyn
In Brooklyn, we are fighting back as well. The murder of Kyam Livingston, Shantel Davis, Kiki Gray, and Akai Gurley has spurred the working class and the communist PLP of Brooklyn into action.
In particular, members of our social justice committee has joined Kyam’s mother, Anita Neal, in monthly rallies since Kyam’s death in July 2013. These rallies have united the family, church members, and members of the West Indian community near where Kyam lived to press for release of the video and the names of the custody officers who abused Kyam and refused her medical treatment.
We are also fighting back by leading discussions, including “The Language of Oppression, How it Hurts Us All,” and sponsoring yearly Juneteenth (a holiday to commemorate the abolishment of slavery in Texas, see page 6) celebrations. This year’s celebration, “Tapestry of Justice in Blues and Poetry,” included a song about people killed by the NYPD. Since 2001, we’ve held an annual joint dinner in solidarity with the local Muslim community. Following that example, First UU LA and Santa Monica UU joined an interfaith march in March in solidarity with the LA Muslim community.
Multiracial Unity Against Racism
The marches and rallies in LA and Brooklyn were multiracial in participation. These were visual representations of our desire to unite all members of the working class in the fight against racism. Speakers, for example, affirmed that the racist oppression and super-exploitation of non-white working people hurts and divides white workers as well. The depression of wages and social welfare for Black, Latin, indigenous, and Asian, and immigrant workers pave the way to depress the wages and fightback of the whole working class—this includes white workers. U.S. wages that average 30 percent higher for white males than Black males are still inadequate to live on. And the millions of white workers with low-paying jobs, including many college graduates, live in poverty—not privilege.
The theory of “white skin privilege” is one communists refute, though it is a prevalent belief in the UUA. This ruling-class theory does a poor job in explaining racist divisions and oppression, but a very good job in turning people of the same class into enemies. Our main enemy is the ruling class.
At the rallies and marches, we stressed white privilege theory reinforces the capitalist drive to divide working people based on so-called “race.” A concrete example is police murder and of white men and women, such as Jason Davis. Since slavery, cops have been getting away with the murder of and brutality toward Black working people; they’ve learned they can do the same to white working people. We must unite and fight racism; not segregate and talk about racism.
The outpouring of open racism that has coalesced around U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump campaign intensifies this challenge. We must mobilize our congregations to fight back against all racism, especially the systematic racism presided over by liberals such as Obama, Clinton, and Sanders.
For the GA two years ago, we wrote a pamphlet showing why the Seven UU Principals cannot be achieved without communist revolution. You can request a copy from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
While helping lead these anti-racist struggles, communists in PLP have the task of showing why racist police and racism in general are inherent to capitalism, and why defeating racism therefore requires communist revolution. Communism will a global system without borders run by workers and in the interests of workers. The source of racism, capitalism and profit, will be eradicated. Ask us all about it! We urge all UU members and everyone belonging to the working class to join PLP in fighting racism building a better world for the working class!