On August 28, 1963, 300,000 demonstrators converged in multiracial unity for the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom. Fifty years later, with racist inequalities growing wider all the time, we can see the limits of reform under capitalism — and the urgent need for communist revolution.
The 1960s were a brighter time for the U.S. working class. Despite reversals of workers’ power in the Soviet Union and China, the revolutions in those countries still inspired class struggle. Two mass movements — for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam — galvanized millions of workers and youth. Rebellions broke out in oppressed and brutalized poor black neighborhoods, from Harlem and Newark to Watts and Detroit.
The March on Washington was designed to channel this anger into a set of legalistic demands. Not everyone went with the program. Malcolm X denounced the march as a “circus” and a “farce.” The author James Baldwin was banned from speaking by mainstream civil rights leaders who were currying favor with President John F. Kennedy. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) John Lewis did speak, but only after the organizers censored his critique of the president’s pending civil rights bill. Among the lines they struck: “Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts.”
 

Legal Reforms Can’t Protect Workers
 The approved demands were read aloud to the throng by pacifist Bayard Rustin. Among them were the passage of “effective” civil rights legislation, the immediate end to segregation “in every school district” in the U.S., the “defeat” of unemployment, an increase in the national minimum wage, and a call for “black men and men of every minority group” to get “all of the rights…given to any citizen.”
The capitalist ruling class, shaken by the urban uprisings of the sixties and the threat they posed to the profit system, gave its bought-and-paid-for politicians a new set of marching orders. The Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Fair Housing Act in 1968. The number of elected black officials grew from 1,469 in 1970 to more than ten thousand today.
But none of these laws or politicians can alter the fundamental fact that U.S. capitalism is in crisis. The bosses’ rate of profit is falling.  Imperialist rivals are rising. (China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s leading manufacturer, and is building a modern deep ocean navy.) With no mass movement to be pacified, and no other nation standing as a communist beacon, U.S. capitalists have been free to intensify their attacks on workers’ standard of living. While median household income has been flat since 1973, and conditions for the poorest are in free fall, the 400 richest U.S. billionaires are now worth $1.7 trillion. According to Forbes magazine, their assets — essentially the profits they’ve stolen from the working class — grew by $200 billion in 2012 alone.
The civil rights movement represented millions of honest working people — black, Latino, Asian and white. Many sacrificed careers and even their lives in this anti-racist struggle. But the movement had no chance to realize its goals because its leadership focused on legal reform within the status quo. Under capitalism, laws can always be changed or reversed or ignored to suit the rulers’ needs of the moment. (This was true long before the Voting Rights Act was gutted last month in a transparently racist decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Laws are the smoke and mirrors the bosses use to conceal what really runs their system, the rule of maximum profit.

New Presidents, Same Old Racism

We’ve had nine presidents after Kennedy: Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, white men and Barack Obama. Nine administrations later, the movement’s “dream” is fast receding amid the nightmare of capitalism. Officially sanctioned racism is on the rise, from police murders of black teenagers to Obama’s wholesale deportation of nearly two million immigrants. Racism will never be reformed away; it’s an essential component of the profit system. The capitalists need it to exploit workers (including white workers), and also to keep them from seeing their common interests — or their common enemy.
Today, material conditions for the working class in general and black workers in particular are deteriorating. Despite countless waves of reforms, we are in many respects worse off than we were thirty or forty years ago. Jobs and freedom, among other things, are harder to come by than they were in 1963. Consider:

•  Mass incarceration. In 1963, the U.S. incarceration rate (per 100,000 adults) was less than 200. Today, despite violent crime dipping to record-low levels, the rate has surged to more than 700 per 100,000 — far higher than in any other developed country. A total of 2.2 million people — 70 percent of whom are black and Latino — are now behind bars, according to the Pew Research Center. Nearly five million more are on probation or parole.
  
  Mass imprisonment and the bosses spreading of drugs was a response to the black rebellions in many U.S. cities. The bosses created the racist “War on Drugs,” instigated by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and sustained by every president since. As a result, black men are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men. More than one of ten young black men between 20 and 34 are behind bars; one of three can expect to go to jail or prison in their lifetimes. Most were arrested on petty drug offenses, the majority for simple possession.
  
  
• Mass unemployment. Over the half-century since 1963, the government’s “official” rate for white unemployment has averaged 5.1percent, less than half the black unemployment rate of 11.6 percent. (To put this in perspective, the overall unemployment rate during recessions in this period has averaged 6.7 percent.) As of last month, the “official” jobless rate for black workers was 12.6 percent. More than four of ten black youth are without work.
  
  Moreover, these official figues exclude workers who have given up looking for non-existent jobs, part-time workers who can’t find full-time jobs and workers who have been jobless for more that six months. With these groups factored in, the true unemployment rate becomes 23 percent (shadowstats.com). And for black workers it may be well over 40 percent.
  
  Even those who find jobs are often mired in poverty. In 1963, the minimum wage was worth more than $9 an hour in 2013 dollars. Today it stands at $7.25.
• Massive school segregation. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, 30 years after violent racists tried and failed to stop integration in Boston, school districts throughout the U.S. have resegregated with a vengeance. While Reagan and both Bushes were openly hostile to school desegregation plans, neither Bill Clinton nor Obama have done anything substantive to stem this tide. By 2010, 38 percent of black students were in schools with fewer than 10 percent white students. Sixteen percent were in apartheid schools where white students numbered less than 1 percent.
  
  As documented by Gary Orfield of the Civil Rights Project, separate is still unequal. Segregated black and Latino schools tend to have fewer resources, less experienced teachers, and less politically connected and wealthy parents. Inferior schooling creates an achievement gap, and gaps in future income and health as well.

• Massive inequalities. As reported by the New York Times (July 30), the United States — the sixth-richest country in the world, based on national income per person — has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates among the developed nations. The U.S. also ranks among the highest for child poverty and overall poverty, and among the lowest for life expectancy. Due to racism, all of these numbers are much worse for black and Latino workers.
  
  Racist wage defferetials, alongside hospital and school closings and deadly cuts in social services, add up to super-profits into the trillions for the capitalist class. They pay for the bosses’ wars in the Middle East and Africa while funnelling billions to Wall Street CEO’s.

Smash Racism with Communism!
It’s a good start to march for jobs and human rights, but we cannot stop there. To put an end to the inequalities and all the racist horrors of capitalism, we need to smash a system built on profit and replace it from the ground up, with a society based on workers’ needs. We need a communist revolution led by a revolutionary party — the Progressive
Labor Party. Join us!

In serving the U.S. ruling class, two factors guide Barack Obama’s policies in the greater Middle East: controlling oil profits, and preparing for a future inter-imperialist war. This explains what Obama did in Libya — and what he hasn’t done in Egypt.
Unlike Libya, Egypt doesn’t have much oil. But it does have the Suez Canal, a vital waterway for the world’s main cheap oil reserves. The bulk of Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iraqi and other Europe- and North America-bound oil exports travel through the canal. Most of it goes under the U.S. and allied British brands of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell. In addition, U.S. Navy warships depend mightily on the canal. The Pentagon’s World War III planning counts on it. If the canal were to be shut by anti-Western insurgents, oil exports would need to detour thousands of miles around the southern Horn of Africa to reach their destinations.
And it’s pertinent to note that Egypt’s armed forces keep the Suez Canal open.
U.S. Rulers See No Evil in Egypt
When Obama ordered the 2011 NATO invasion of Libya, he hid behind a “responsibility to protect” Libyans from dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Left unmentioned were Libya’s considerable oil reserves, which are coveted by Big Oil. But since the July 3 coup in Cairo, the U.S. president and his capitalist bosses have looked the other way as Egypt’s military murders hundreds of unarmed protesters in the streets. In fact, the U.S. continues to provide the same bloodstained junta with its annual $1.5 billion supply of military hardware, made by profiteering U.S. arms-makers.
Why the inconsistency? Because workers’ lives have no value for capitalist rulers. The bosses are steered by profit alone. Obama’s raid two years ago was spurred not by Libya’s 5.7 million suffering inhabitants, but rather its 1.6 million daily barrels of oil. Then as now, the needs and limits of U.S. imperialism — not any concern for our class — dictate the bosses’ deadly Middle East gambits.
Besides trusting Egypt’s military tyrants to safeguard the Suez Canal, the U.S. rulers have assigned them two other important jobs. The generals are charged with preventing Arab states’ attacks on U.S. ally Israel, and also with curbing the spread of anti-U.S. al Qaeda-led Islamic forces inside oil-rich monarchies in the Exxon-Chevron-BP-Shell sphere. Ousted president Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, wasn’t up to these tasks. No sooner did Morsi get the boot than the petroleum-soaked princes of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates pledged $12 billion to prop up Egypt’s military brass.
Bosses’ Plan B: Let Syrian Workers Die
Meanwhile, as strife in Syria has killed over 100,000 and left millions homeless, no vow to rescue the afflicted can be heard from the White House. Another country with limited oil but vast geopolitical significance, Syria hosts a Russian naval base and has strong alliances with U.S. foes China and Iran. U.S. rulers would love to be rid of Bashar Assad’s pro-Moscow/Beijing/Teheran regime. But at the same time, they fear strengthening the militant Islamists who hold the upper hand among the Syrian rebels. As a result, Obama has abandoned his phony “responsibility to protect” and chosen to let the bloodshed continue.
Plan A for the U.S. in Syria was to use defecting officers and Islamist fighters to bring down Assad and then install a pro-Western government. But given the unexpected strength of the Syrian army and the unreliability of the opposition, Obama & Co. have apparently turned to Plan B: Let the war drag on in the hope that the two sides will weaken or even destroy each other.
Anthony Cordesman, based at the U.S. ruling class’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, confirms this cynical approach. He proposes that the U.S. can protect its huge geostrategic stakes in the Middle East by limiting military aid to Syria to small arms, at least for now, he states (Washington Post July 22):
If Assad succeeds in crushing the opposition or otherwise maintains control over most of Syria, Iran will have a massive new degree of influence over Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in a polarized Middle East divided between Sunni and Shiite. Minorities [millions of refugees] will be steadily driven into exile. This would present serious risks for Israel, weaken Jordan and Turkey and, most important, give Iran far more influence in the Persian Gulf, an area home to 48 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. If Washington arms the rebels and they still lose, the United States will at least have shown its willingness to make decisions and honor its commitments. It will have shown it will make good on its words and support its allies.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, the ultimate insider, concurs. As he told the U.S. Senate on July 18, “I am in favor of building a moderate opposition.” Dempsey cites U.S. budget constraints on broader U.S. action in Syria, which would require “thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces…needed to assault and secure critical sites.” These costs, Dempsey later wrote to the Senate, could average “well over $1 billion per month” (which he thinks is excessive).
Main Capitalists Prep for Broader War
Dempsey’s reluctance to over-spend isn’t just aimed to appease the anti-tax, anti-deficit Republicans. It follows the lead of the dominant liberal wing of U.S. bosses — the ultra-imperialist finance capitalists like JPMorgan Chase and Exxon Mobil — who have far bigger fish to fry than Syria. Their top spokesman, Richard Haass, president of their supremely influential Council on Foreign Relations think tank, called for “refraining from direct armed intervention in Syria’s current civil war” (New York Times, 6/22/13). Haass said U.S. rulers should capitalize on their current military lull (after the Iraq and Afghan drawdowns) to make long-term preparations for potential world war with their imperialist rivals. “Most important, we should step up efforts to maintain stability in Asia and the Pacific Ocean, where this century’s great powers could easily collide,” Haass declared.
All of these ruling-class servants dismiss the impact of their imperialist policies on the international working class. None of them are concerned how their wars in the Middle East and South Asia destroy workers’ homes, bomb workers’ schools and hospitals, maim workers’ children, and kill millions in the process.
The capitalists’ profit-driven system breeds mass unemployment and poverty, burns workers alive in garment factories, wrecks the minds of soldiers forced into war, and uses racism and sexism to divide the working class and weaken its ability to challenge any of these horrors. At the same time, workers are forced to pay for the wars that slaughter them. They bear the brunt of capitalism’s world economic crisis through cuts in wages, social services, and healthcare, and through long-term unemployment. The bosses’ never-ending drive for maximum profits falls on workers’ heads from Greece and Spain to Pakistan and Bangladesh to Turkey and Brazil and Mexico. U.S. workers are far from immune. Most vulnerable of all are immigrant workers who move from one capitalist country to another, searching for the promised “better life” but falling under the heel of exploiters with every border they cross.
Communist Revolution, the Only Solution
The rulers do worry, however, about the revolutionary potential of the working class. That’s why they are intensifying their fascist attacks in every corner of the globe. Hitler’s Third Reich was a tea party compared to what the world’s capitalists have in store for us.
But the international working class is not taking this offensive lying down. Workers have taken to the streets throughout the world — striking, fighting the bankers’ austerity attacks, rebelling against a siege of racist murders of youth like Trayvon Martin.
The rulers try to divert workers by offering electoral choices of various ruling-class stooges, from Obama to South Africa’s Jacob Zuma to Haiti’s Michel Martelly. They use these sellout reformers to try to divert our class from the one real solution to the hell of capitalism: communist revolution. Only communist revolution can create a society run by and for the working class. And it can only be achieved by building a mass communist party, the Progressive Labor Party, to lead it.
It is imperative for all PL’ers and friends, wherever PLP groups are organizing, to spread our communist politics among workers and youth in every mass organization we’ve joined. By starting with tens and hundreds, we’ll eventually reach thousands and millions. What everyone does counts.
Only communism can rid the world of bosses, profits and wars. Only communism can end racism, sexism and mass slaughters. Capitalism is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. Communist revolution will bury it forever.

WASHINGTON, DC, July 21 — After the racist acquittal of George Zimmerman who murdered teenager Trayvon Martin, PLP’ers took to the streets here with many other outraged workers and students. Twelve hours after the verdict, PLP assembled over a dozen organizers to leaflet and mobilize workers in the Stoddert Terrace neighborhood in Ward 7 against the acquittal. This bullhorn rally moved through the community where PL’ers have been active for over two years, reaching scores of residents with flyers and speeches. Some young workers called for Zimmerman’s head! Many understood how serious the racist offensive in the U.S. is today.
This racist assault includes not only police and vigilante murders of young black people but also the mass incarceration and slave labor of prisoners who are mainly black and Latino; Congress’s effort to terminate food stamps; and the Supreme Court’s recent reversals of affirmative action and voting rights legislation. Locally, affordable housing is disappearing as gentrification takes hold, with the connivance of corrupt city officials. Meanwhile, the bosses have launched new attacks on the mainly black Metro transit workers.
A week after the July 20 rally, the Peoples Coalition of Prince George’s County, Maryland, organized numerous local groups for a bold 10-mile “Justice for Trayvon” march. It left from the County and strode militantly through DC’s working-class communities, ending at the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Cheer ‘Justice for Trayvon’ Marchers
Almost 100 workers and students made this arduous march, in the best tradition of the Civil Rights movement. Residents cheered and drivers blared their horns in solidarity. Marchers joined Dorothy Elliott in vowing to re-open the 20-year-old police murder of her teenage son, Archie Elliott III. He was shot at 21 times of which 14 bullets struck him while he sat handcuffed in the front seat of a squad car. The two cops who murdered Archie have never been punished.
PLP marchers also circulated a petition demanding that the Metro transit system reverse its recent policy of refusing to hire anyone with any kind of criminal record. Metro is eager to racially stigmatize its mainly black drivers. It has even fired workers who have worked for Metro for many years simply because they had a record before Metro hired them! Some marchers received CHALLENGE for the first time and were interested in hearing about PLP’s global involvement in workers’ struggles in Haiti and elsewhere as well as our role in building a revolutionary communist movement in the D.C. area.
Expose Sharpton’s Respect for Jury Decision
After a brief rally at the DOJ, the Peoples Coalition decided to march to a nearby rally organized by Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) to bring the Coalition’s militant fighting spirit to the hundreds gathered at a local courthouse. The NAN leader preached passivity, declaring his support for the “rule of law” and for respect for the jury’s decision even while disagreeing with it.
Sharpton’s organization, known for falling in line with President Obama, had told the Coalition to change its plans and join them. In response, an organizer for the Peoples Coalition declared, “We’re autonomous and independent of the Civil Rights leadership and the Democratic Party. Therefore, with all due respect, we take no orders from Rev. Al Sharpton or any Civil Rights leader. Our orders come directly from the masses, our energy, loyalty and activism is on direct behalf of the masses.” The Coalition thus brought a message of militant struggle, enthusiastically received by those at the NAN rally.
Capitalism’s Profit Drive Root of Racism
But even the message of the Peoples Coalition was incomplete. It did not address how racism is a foundation for capitalism’s drive for maximum profits and how it uses racism to super-exploit black workers and to divide and drag down the entire working class. The struggle against racism can only be successful when its root — the exploitative capitalist system — is overthrown. There can be no accommodation with capitalism if racism is ever to be finally eliminated.
Actually, if Zimmerman had been convicted, the rulers and their flunky misleaders would only use it to claim “the system works,” while hundreds of other youth continue to be victims of racist murder.
The next day PLP members and friends joined a Speak-Out for Trayvon organized by a teacher at a local literacy program. She had visited Stoddert Terrace the weekend before the rally and wanted to move towards more action. Over 50 people attended to discuss how racism affected their personal lives through racial profiling, intimidation and stereotypes. They want to fight back by:

• abolishing the “stand-your-ground” laws
• divesting in banks that fund private prisons
• boycotting Officer Friendly visits to schools and working with youth
• focusing the August 24 March on Washington on Trayvon and the bosses’ criminalization of black youth.

Speakers also attacked capitalism as the source of these problems. PLP members invited the group to our bi-monthly study/action group meetings to discuss how we can re-organize society based on communist principles.
The bold actions of participants in all of these events have laid the foundation for further progress, both ideological and practical, in the struggle against racism and for communist revolution.

CHICAGO, July 14 — Supporters of Trayvon Martin gradually gathered at what first looked like a lonely intersection. News crews and photographers were first to arrive but slowly and steadily students and workers began arriving. The march organizers were college students who were outraged and emotionally affected by the verdict.
Progressive Labor Party members started speaking with the people and distributed 250 CHALLENGES and 700 PL leaflets. All were well- received and 17 contacts were made.
As the crowd grew one could sense the disbelief over the verdict, the anger over another injustice. Reforms, non-violence and prayer were part of this demonstration’s intended message.
However, with every step of the march PL’s message resounded throughout: To fight back and see that the present system is killing us — that racism and cops are tools for the bosses to maximize their profits. The message was so loud cars driving by would honk in support and keep in pace with our chants to let us know that our message was coming across.
As the march approached its destination, PLP members and friends continued to distribute CHALLENGES and flyers, highlighting the key struggles around nationalism, racism and non-violence. The 300 marchers heard the speakers answer the question, “What do we do from here?” with a call for non-violence and prayer and to sign an NAACP petition, reflecting the outlook of the outrage of the organizers, not the protestors.
We had a banner reading, “It’s time for Communist Revolution.” That’s our class’s only alternative to racist cops, courts and their racist laws.