 ILWU at October 23 2010, Oakland rally demanding justice for Oscar Grant, murdered by the cops. (Photo: Steve Rhodes/Flickr) |
Articles From
 Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution |
| Cops
Shoot Jacob
Blake in the
Back, Shackle
Him to
Hospital Bed,
Anti-Racist
Protesters
Murdered by
Fascistic
Gunman Cops, Feds and Fascists Unleash Racist Terror in Kenosha, Wisconsin For Mass Worker/Black/Immigrant Action! Jacob Blake lies paralyzed in his hospital bed, shackled by hand and foot, after being shot with seven bullets to his back by police in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 23. Two days later, anti-racist protesters Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum were murdered by a rifle-toting 17-year-old white supremacist vigilante from Illinois, Kyle Rittenhouse. Racist Republican president Donald Trump has dispatched hundreds of militarized forces to lock down Kenosha, while pro-Trump fascistic militias descended on Kenosha. But it was the Democratic mayor and Democratic governor who unleashed the racist police on demonstrators, imposed a curfew and brought in the Wisconsin National Guard to suppress the protests. Cops, Feds and Fascists Unleash Racist Terror in Kenosha, Wisconsin (28 August 2020) |
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| Millions Take the
Streets in Upheaval Against Cop
Murder Machine To Uproot Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop set off a wave of outrage that swept across the United States and has continued for weeks. Millions of people took to the streets to denounce the racist police murder of black people. As protests spread cops geared up for battle attacked demonstrators. Democratic mayors and media screamed about “looting” to justify “law-and-order” crackdowns, while the incendiary racist Trump called to shoot looters and brought in thousands of troops to the capital. These have been the largest sustained protests in U.S. history. Seeing the shift in public opinion, Democratic mayors, who are “the bosses of the racist killer cops,” tried to coopt protests by pretending to shift some funds from the police to social programs. Yet none of the many plans to “reform” the police have ever succeeded because racist and anti-working-class repression is the essential function of the police. The only way to put an end to the cop murder machine is through socialist revolution. The combustible material that can fuel a revolution is everywhere. What’s urgently needed is revolutionary leadership. To Uproot Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution (10 July 2020) |
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| Mobilize
Labor/Black/Immigrant
Power Against Cop Terror! ILWU Shutdown of West Coast Ports Points the Way Forward The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down all 29 ports on the U.S. West Coast on June 19, in honor of George Floyd and to protest “police brutality and systematic racism.” This is a big step forward, as daily and nightly mass protests of thousands continue across the United States weeks after Floyd was brutally murdered by a Minneapolis cop. From the outset of the protests, the Internationalist Group has called to mobilize labor/black/immigrant action against racist police terror. In addition to the outrage over the police murder of Floyd, the initiators of the ILWU port shutdown were impelled to take action by President Donald Trump’s threats of gunfire against protesters, and Democratic and Republican governors calling in the National Guard to suppress demonstrations. The ILWU action has been called for Juneteenth, which celebrates the day – 19 June 1865 – that slavery was formally abolished in Texas, the last of the Confederate slave states to be occupied by the Union Army, bringing the Civil War, the second American Revolution, to a close. The only way to break the death grip of the killer cops today is to smash the whole racist police/prison/judicial apparatus of the capitalist state through socialist revolution. ILWU to Shut All West Coast Ports Against Racist Police Brutality (16 June 2020) |
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| The Racist
Police Murder
of George
Floyd Only Revolution Can Bring Justice! By Gordon Barnes Amidst the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, the United States has been wracked by nationwide protests against racist police brutality and murder. Nightly we hear the helicopters overhead; daily come new images of police violence, repression, curfews, arrests, and the threat of martial law. Why is it that, despite the waves of protest and cyclical pledges of “reform,” the police keep murdering black people? The list of their names is endless. As marchers chant them, some of us add “It never stops.” Born as a professionalized force from the slave patrols in the U.S. South, the police serve the ruling elite and protect their property and social order. That is the fundamental role of the cops under capitalism. What is in danger of occurring again during the current cycle of fervent protest, is the funneling of dissent into the Democratic Party. Democratic mayors largely control the urban centers in this country, and their police forces. It is these Democratic mayors who have instituted the various curfews and police crackdowns, and a series of Democratic Party governors have, along with their Republican confreres, deployed the National Guard. To overcome the racial oppression which is, and always has been, part of the bedrock of American capitalism, the power of the multiracial working class must be mobilized. When Will It End? The Racist Police Lynching of George Floyd (3 June 2020) |
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| For
Labor/Black/Immigrant
Action to
Fight Racist
Terror Fury Over Minneapolis Police Murder of George Floyd “I can’t breathe,” George Floyd kept saying as a Minneapolis police officer dug a knee into his neck. For millions across the country and the world, it hauntingly, unbearably recalls the last words of Eric Garner, the Staten Island, New York man that a cop killed by chokehold in 2014. The racist cop murder of George Floyd set off furious protests in Minneapolis that soon spread to other cities. This latest racist outrage occurs in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is killing African Americans and Latinos at staggeringly high rates. The African American, Latin American, Native American, poor and oppressed communities in the Twin Cities, including a sizeable Somali population, have long been targeted by the police. The names Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Thurman Blevins, Chiasher Fong Vue are testimony that the police lynchings never stop. We call for mass workers action joining with the black population and all the oppressed to shut the Twin Cities down. The inescapable fact is that justice for George Floyd and all those killed by this racist system can only be achieved by socialist revolution. Fury Over Minneapolis Police Murder of George Floyd (28 May 2020) Bad Apples, Broken Windows and Other Myths About the Police (February 2016) |
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| “American Apartheid” by Design A Review of Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America By Charles Brover, Class Struggle Education Workers After more than a decade of hard struggle and the passage of laws in the mid-1960s against official Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement suddenly stopped. What was termed de facto segregation was deemed off-limits, or at least had to be left for another day. Rothstein’s book conclusively proves that rigid residential segregation and discrimination against African American, Latino and Asian minorities was always de jure, officially sanctioned. This has had a devastating effect on everything from school integration to murderous police repression. But while laying out key elements of the structural foundation of black oppression in the U.S., The Color of Law fails to go to their root in the system of racist American capitalism. In the United States in 2016 there were 2.3 million evictions: 6,300 a day, four every minute. And with over 3.5 million homeless people in the country, there are 19 million unoccupied dwellings. This powerful essay from Class Struggle Education Workers demonstrates that it will take nothing short of a socialist revolution to solve the housing question. “American Apartheid” by Design (21 November 2018) |
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| As
The Boss,
Mayor Rahm
Emanuel,
Blames Black
Community for
Violence Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution On July 14, Chicago police gunned down yet another black person, Harith Augustus, a barber. “Snoop” Augustus, known as a peaceful man, was stopped on the pretext of exhibiting the “characteristics of an armed person,” and was shot dead even though he had a valid gun license. For the police in this rigidly segregated city, and throughout this country founded on the bedrock of slavery, it is always open season on black people. And on Latinos, immigrants, Native Americans … the list goes on. Moreover, in Chicago and almost every other big city, Democrats are the bosses of the racist killer cops. This is all coming to a head in the upcoming trial of killer cop Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. And Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel, running for a third term, is stoking racist reaction by blaming lax “morals” in the black community for the violence engendered by rampant poverty, unemployment and brutal police occupation. Yet some of the same themes are echoed in protests, where instead of denouncing racist police repression the focus is on opposition to “gun violence” in general. Talk of “reforming” the police or controlling guns only serves to divert protest away from a revolutionary perspective and to strengthen the repressive agencies of the capitalist state, while leading protesters into the dead-end of bourgeois pressure politics. The stark fact is that there is no solution to war, poverty and racist repression under capitalism. Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree (August 2018) |
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| Cops
Kill Far More Every Week Democrats Exploit School Shooting to Push Racist Gun Control The horrific slaughter of 14 students and 3 teachers at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida set off a national uproar. With young survivors of the massacre in the forefront, a mobilization for gun control was launched. This immediately became part of the liberal campaign to get out the vote for Democrats in the November mid-term elections. The shooting was a heinous crime, but the “movement” for more restrictions on ownership of firearms is a reactionary drive, thoroughly orchestrated by the Democratic Party, to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. This will not stop a deranged and/or racist mass murderer. Gun control in the United States has from the beginning had a racist character, to disarm African Americans, and in recent decades derived from the backlash against Malcolm X and the Black Panthers in particular. Weapons searches have been used as the excuse for police persecution of black youth (“stop and frisk”) and for outright police terror, such as the 1993 Waco Massacre by Democrat Bill Clinton. The Internationalist Group has from its inception opposed gun control and upheld the right of self-defense, and in particular the right of black armed self-defense. We have called on class-conscious workers to begin the work now of building workers defense guards, based on the mass organizations of the working class and oppressed, to counter the threat of violent racist and outright fascist forces. Democrats Exploit School Shooting to Push Racist Gun Control (April 2018) How Armed Self-Defense Stopped a Lynching (April 2018)Aiding and Abetting the Capitalist Democratic Party “Socialists” Chase After Anti-Gun Movement The cynical exploitation of traumatized youth by the Democratic Party to further its agenda of gun control has provided an X-ray into the politics of a panoply of left groups. When key sectors of the most powerful ruling class in world want to disarm the populace, slashing a key democratic right in order to leave the oppressed defenseless, how do socialists respond? In the last few weeks, as liberals, police chiefs and Democratic mayors (“the bosses of the racist killer cops”) push for gun control, almost the entire U.S. left has marched in lockstep with them. Why? Because they are chasing after the young marchers who have been enrolled in this campaign to bolster the capitalist state. The bourgeoisie’s rule is made possible in large part by its ability to perpetrate violence against those it rules over. Gun control has historically been used to disarm black people and intensify racist repression. While some opportunist leftists voice qualms or reservations about some gun control measures, they all end up supporting them. A “left” that plays into the hands of the Democratic Party can only lead to defeat. A struggle for revolution is counterposed to this “movement” for gun control and for the Democratic Party of imperialist war, mass deportations and racist police terror. “Socialists” Chase After Anti-Gun Movement (April 2018) |
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| For
Labor/Black Mobilization Against Racist Cop
Terror Trump’s Racist Vendetta Against Black Athletes Donald Trump has been on a racist tear this season, engaged in an furious vendetta against protesting black athletes of the National Football League. It started in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick, then quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the “Star Spangled Banner” in protest against the ongoing racist police murders of black and Latino people. Kaepernick has been blacklisted by the NFL, but the “Kaepernick effect” hasn’t gone away. The protests of 2017 became more widespread in response to Trump’s blatant racism. Last year there were at least 1,188 people killed by cops. Part of the reason for the prominence of protests by black players has been the dearth of mass protests like those in 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Many of the main leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have channeled support into the Democratic Party and diverted the protests into electoral politics. There should be tens of thousands in the streets mobilized against racist police murder. But to actually have an effect requires much more, above all breaking the political stranglehold of the partner parties of capital. Trump’s Racist Vendetta Against Black Athletes (January 2018) |
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| I Am
Not Your Negro James Baldwin in Racist America I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary film based on two works by the great black gay novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987). It is directed by Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born film maker who also directed Lumumba, about the assassination of the Congolese independence leader, and The Young Marx. The film is important for young revolutionaries to see. It powerfully combines dramatic historical footage and Baldwin’s stirring, courageous denunciation of the centrality of racism to U.S. society. Thus, while the movie doesn’t put forward a revolutionary program – nor does it claim to – it vividly dramatizes why the “color-blind” liberalism and tepid reform schemes for a “juster” capitalism under a refurbished Democratic Party put forward by the likes of Bernie Sanders cannot overcome racism. The material reality of black oppression continually generates the racist ideology that America’s rulers use to divide the working people. As opposed to the lilberal integrationism embodied by Martin Luther King, or the dead-end of black nationalism, we fight for revolutionary integrationism, to pull up capitalism’s system of racial oppression by its roots. That requires learning the lessons of history, and this honest film can be a powerful aid in learning those lessons. I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin in Racist America (January 2018) |
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| Toward
a Multiracial Revolutionary Party Imperialist Social Democracy vs. Black Liberation As the civil rights movement picked up in the U.S. South in the 1960s, the images of Ku Klux Klan night riders and cops with German shepherd dogs fire-hosing black marchers, many of them children, revealed the ugly reality of U.S. “democracy.” This undercut Washington’s effort to counterpose itself to British colonialism in Africa and what the imperialists saw as the Soviet “Communist threat.” In stepped the virulently anti-Soviet Cold Warriors of U.S. social democracy, dominated by followers of one Max Shachtman. The Shachtmanites, grandfathers of today’s DSA, talked of “realigning” the Democratic Party as an alliance of organized labor and the Southern black population. In practice, they acted to keep civil rights activists subordinated to the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations which rested on support from the Dixiecrats. As soldiers in this reactionary cause, Shachtman deputies Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin sought to tame, sideline or drive out radical elements from the struggle. The Trotskyists, in contrast, fought for the program of revolutionary integrationism. Imperialist Social Democracy vs. Black Liberation (December 2017) |
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| There Is
No Justice for Black People in the Racist
Capitalist Courts Black America Under the Gun Workers Revolution Will Avenge Philando Castile The acquittal of the cop who gunned down Philando Castile on 6 July 2016 as he sat in his car in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, is proof positive that the whole system is rigged so that police can kill with impunity. Anyone who saw the heart-wrenching Facebook Live video by his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, as millions did, knows. Anyone who saw the horrifying police dashboard camera video and audio, as the jury did repeatedly, of the frenzied cop pumping bullets into Philando with Diamond and her four-year-old daughter in the car with him, can have no doubt. Philando Castile was executed, the ultimate penalty of “driving while black.” And his executioner walked. It’s the way the system works. Kill-crazy cops are an expression of the fact that American capitalism is based on the oppression of black people, which has continued from the days of chattel slavery through Jim Crow segregation to today’s mass incarceration. Nothing short of workers revolution will change that. Today the police kill with abandon under Republican Trump. Yesterday they did the same under Democrat Obama. Various liberals and opportunist pseudo-socialists call to join together in a broad “resistance” to Trump, meaning they want to make a “popular front” with the Democrats, chaining black people to the party whose mayors preside over police murder across the country. Changing which capitalist party is in office will not alter things. We must fight instead to build the nucleus of a multi-racial and multi-ethnic revolutionary workers party that can attack the scourge of racial oppression at its roots. Black America Under the Gun (27 June 2017) |
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| Freedom for Black Lives Matter
Organizer Jasmine Abdullah! California “Lynching” Conviction Is a Threat to All! Mobilize Labor/Black/Immigrant Power – Only Revolution Can Bring Justice! On June 1, 28-year-old Black Lives Matter organizer Jasmine Abdullah (Richards) was grotesquely convicted in near-by Pasadena under a California law until recently known as “felony lynching.” At her trial, an entirely non-black jury accepted the prosecution’s outrageous claim that Jasmine’s non-violent effort to protect a young black woman from police brutality was a crime legally equivalent to participating in a KKK lynch mob for the purposes of murdering that woman. Jasmine’s conviction sets a new precedent for the criminalization of protest activity, and is a threat to all those who would speak out against injustice. As we have seen time and time again across the country, this latest drive in California to further repress black activists on behalf of the capitalist rulers is spearheaded by a black Democrat: Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacy. Across the country there has been a push to draw Black Lives Matter activists into the electoral circus of American capitalism, and the Democratic Party in particular. Illusions in the Democrats serve as a roadblock to class struggle against racist repression. We call to break with the Democrats and all capitalist parties, and for labor-black-immigrant mobilizations against racist cop terror. California “Lynching” Conviction Is a Threat to All! (7 June 2016) |
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| Chicago, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Minneapolis… Democrats Are the Bosses of the Racist Killer Cops Mobilize Labor-Black-Immigrant Power – Build a Revolutionary Workers Party! If 2014 was the Year of Mass Protest Against Racist Cop Terror, 2015 was the Year of More Racist Cop Terror. After drawing up the annual balance sheet of official murder in the United States, the bottom line is 1,202 killed by the police. 2015 also underscored how the entire capitalist “justice system,” from top to bottom, works seamlessly to protect the killers. As the year drew to a close there was a drumbeat of legal decisions in which cops were not charged or not found guilty in the deaths of their unarmed black victims. What is hardly ever mentioned is that the police have bosses, namely mayors and city councils, which in cities across the U.S. are almost all Democrats. It is the Democratic Party of racist repression and imperialist war that is running the country on behalf of Wall Street. Racist state terror has been a cornerstone of U.S. capitalism throughout, and it is this system that must be shut down, by workers and the oppressed mobilizing our class power, leading to socialist revolution. Democrats Are the Bosses of the Racist Killer Cops (9 January 2016)
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| It Will Take Workers
Revolution to End It Killer Cops, Vigilantes: Racist Terror Stalks Black America For Labor / Black / Immigrant Mobilization Against Police Killings Through the summer and fall of 2014 there were explosive protests against racist murder of black men by the police, and then over the refusal by the authorities to charge the killer cops with any crime at all. Then suddenly the mass marches stopped after two New York cops were shot by an enraged man. With their rhyming reformist chants, organizers blinded demonstrators to the fact that the enemy was not just some racist cops but the capitalist system and its apparatus of racist repression. Understanding the class nature of the state, and the inherent impunity of its enforcers, is key. Attempts to build a mass reform movement are stymied by the fact that virtually every every conceivable measure, from body cameras to civilian review boards, has already been tried, yet the killing goes relentlessly on. Calls for “community control of the police” are a dangerous illusion, for the ruling class will never let the exploited and oppressed have a say over the forces that that enforce their oppression. Well over 1,000 people are killed by the police across the U.S. every year. Racist vigilantes act as auxiliaries to this murder machine. Revolutionary Marxists call to mobilize the power of labor, of black, Latino and immigrant and all working people against racist terror. But ultimately, nothing short of socialist revolution can put a stop to the racist terror that is inherent in American capitalism. Killer Cops, Vigilantes: Racist Terror Stalks Black America (30 June 2015) Police bonapartism (30 June 2015) |
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| Horrendous
Murder of Nine African
Americans by White Supremacist
Charleston Massacre and Cop Terror: It’s Racist American Capitalism Finish the Civil War with Workers Revolution! After the lynching of Trayvon Martin, after the cop murders of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray and so many others – and after the mass protests coast-to-coast unleashed by those racist murders – now comes the horrific massacre of nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. It doesn’t stop, and for a reason: ever since slavery, violent racist suppression, repression and oppression of black people is part of the DNA of American capitalism. That heritage and that reality is what was shown in Charleston. The authorities and official manufacturers of public opinion try as they might to portray this gruesome slaughter as the work of a lone, deranged gunman. But the fact is that this massacre was no aberration, it was an integral part of a rising line of murderous racist reaction, and a bloody history going back to the slave South. Charleston was not only the center of the slave trade, it was the site of the planned slave revolt led by Denmark Vesey, a founder of the Emanuel AME Church where the June 17 massacre took place. It is also where the first black unions were formed after the Civil War. Today, the power of labor must be brought to bear in the fight against racist terror, whether by the police or vigilantes as in Charleston. Charleston Massacre and Cop Terror: It’s Racist American Capitalism (22 June 2015) |
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| Baltimore Rises
Up Over Police Murder of Freddie Gray – National Guard, State Police Impose Emergency Rule Defend Black Baltimore, Cops and Troops Out! For Labor / Black / Immigrant Mobilization Against Police Killings Stamp Out Racist Cop Terror – Fight for Workers Revolution The nationwide outrage over the orgy of racist police murders reached the flashpoint in Baltimore, Maryland. Every day for more than a week there were protests over the cop killing of Freddie Gray. Then following the funeral service for Freddie, black youth were confronted by a wall of police and the frustration boiled over. As the media screamed “riots,” the mayor declared a curfew. The governor imposed a state of emergency, ordering in the state police, thousands of cops from other jurisdictions and the National Guard. As black Democrats join with Republicans to enforce racist “law and order” against those who rise up against injustice, black Baltimore must not stand alone. Across the country, police unleash their pathological violence against the black, Latino and immigrant poor and working people in order to intimidate. To defeat the forces of repression, we need to bring out a more powerful force, that of the organized working class leading all the oppressed. A real fight against the killer cops must be directed against the ruling class, its repressive forces and the capitalist system which spawns racist police terror. Defend Black Baltimore, Cops and Troops Out! (30 April 2015) |
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| ILWU
Dock Workers to Shut Port of Oakland
& March on City Hall South Carolina AFL-CIO Calls for Workers Solidarity Across U.S. Unions to
Mobilize on May Day Against
Racist Police Killings
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| Mumia Gravely Ill Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now! Don’t Let Them Kill Him in Prison Mumia Abu-Jamal is in grave medical condition. After earlier being taken from the hospital over objections from his family, and then two days ago removed from the prison infirmary and placed in the general prison population, Mumia’s medical condition is worsening. Readers are urged to contact prison authorities and demand that he be seen immediately, and not be left to go into a diabetic coma. For decades the ruling class whose crimes he has relentlessly exposed and denounced has tried and failed to silence “the voice of the voiceless” by execution. Now they seem bent on killing him through deprivation of urgently needed medical attention. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now! Don’t Let Them Kill Him in Prison (24 April 2015)  NJ Teacher Whose Students Sent Get-Well Cards to Mumia |
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| Uproot Racism – Only
Revolution Can Bring Justice! From Ferguson to New York: All Out Against Police Terror! Across the country, hundreds of thousands anxiously awaited the news from Missouri. Then came the dreaded announcement: white killer cop Darren Wilson would face no charges for gunning down 18-year-old black youth Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb last August. Mixed with the outrage, fury and indignation, many felt devastated by the inescapable truth: there is no justice in racist America. That night, November 24, thousands protested in at least 90 U.S. cities; by the next night there were tens of thousands of protesters in 170 cities nationwide. And they haven’t stopped. The grand jury gave a green light for police brutality and murder of black and Latino youth, particularly young men. Many chant that “the whole damn system is guilty.” We say that system is capitalism, which from the days of chattel slavery to Jim Crow segregation to mass incarceration today has been built on black oppression. And the only way to end cop terror is through revolution – socialist revolution – to bring this racist system down. The Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (CUNY), along with the Internationalist Group and Class Struggle Education Workers, marched in the protests from the outset and called a speak-out the next day which drew over 100 students, faculty and workers at Hunter College. We put forward a revolutionary, working-class program, declaring “No Justice in the Capitalist Courts” and calling for worker/black/immigrant mobilization against police terror. We linked cop terror in Ferguson with the police massacre of students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico. While many repeated, “No justice, no peace,” we chanted “Only revolution can bring justice.”From Ferguson to New York: All Out Against Police Terror! (December 2014) |
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| Racist
Outrage: NYPD Cop Who Killed Eric Garner Walks “Eric Garner, Michael Brown – Shut the Whole System Down!” A week after the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri, a Staten Island grand jury announced that no charges would be filed against the NYPD cop who chokeholded Eric Garner to death in late July. The fact that the murder of Eric Garner was caught on video and still the murderers got off exposes all the phony talk by NYC Democratic mayor de Blasio and Democratic president Obama about “retraining” police and putting body cameras on cops. As tens of thousands went into the streets nationwide in the next days, protesters chanted Eric’s last words, “I can’t breathe.” The CUNY Internationalist Clubs joined in the protests from the first hour and held a speak-out the next day to denounce this racist atrocity. Our chants, “Eric Garner, Michael Brown – Shut the whole system down!” and “Only revolution can bring justice!” were widely picked up. The stark fact is that to do away with racist police terror for good, we must kick out the racist ruling class that the police “serve and protect.” “Eric Garner, Michael Brown – Shut the Whole System Down!” (December 2014) |
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| Outrage Over Cop Murder of
Michael Brown Throws Capitalist Rulers Into
National Crisis Mobilize Across U.S. Against Racist Police Terror in Missouri For Labor/Black/Immigrant Mobilization Now! Stand with Protests Against Military / Police Occupation Drop Charges Against All Arrested Protesters All Cops and Troops Out of Ferguson, Mo.! When a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri shot down an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, and cops left his body lying in the street for hours, it set off an explosion of mass anger that hasn’t stopped. Despite massive deployment of military weaponry and armor, demonstrators brave racist repression by local and state police and the National Guard. What has happened in this white-ruled black Missouri town is not just the result of local racism, it is also a reflection of the rampant militarization of police forces across the U.S. The federal government has poured tens of billions of dollars into arming police for internal war, and we the poor, oppressed and working people are the target. The Internationalist Group stands with the embattled people of Ferguson, and hail the courageous youth who have refused to be intimidated by everything the racist rulers have thrown at them. Racist repression is a bedrock of American capitalism. Nothing short of socialist revolution will end it. Mobilize Across U.S. Against Racist Police Terror in Missouri (August 2014) |
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| Mobilize Workers Action Against
Police Terror! Racist NYPD Murder of Eric Garner The racists in blue uniforms of the New York Police Department are at it again. Eric Garner, 43, was standing on a corner in Staten Island when he was set upon by cops. When he complained of harassment, they put him in a chokehold. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” he said over and over, but this didn’t stop the killer cops. In the aftermath, protesters have called for the ouster of NYPD top cop William Bratton, whose policy of massive arrests for minor infractions targeted Garner. But liberals and reformist leftists have given Bratton’s boss, liberal Democratic NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, a free pass. We said at the time of his election last fall, “De Blasio Will Be ‘Bloomberg Lite’.” And so he has been. As a capitalist Democratic Party politician, he takes his orders from Wall Street and Washington. The response to heinous crimes like the murder of Eric Garner should be to massively mobilize NYC workers and the oppressed in class-struggle action. It will take nothing less than workers revolution to put an end to this system of racist police repression. Racist NYPD Murder of Eric Garner (26 July 2014) |
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| No Justice in the Racist Capitalist System Workers Revolution Will Avenge Trayvon Martin Mobilize Workers Power to Shut Down “Stop & Frisk”! For the Right of Armed Black Self-Defense! Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old black youth, was lynched twice, first last year by a racist vigilante in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, and now once more in a legal lynching in court where prosecution, defense, judge and jury worked together to acquit the murderer, George Zimmerman. For the second time in two years, angry protests swept the country, as thousands chanted “the whole damn system is guilty." That system is racist American capitalism, and it will keep on claiming the lives of African Americans, Latinos and other oppressed groups until it is swept away by workers revolution. While liberal capitalist politicians, black and white, try to channel the outrage into calls for more gun control and appeals to the Obama administration, and many reformist leftist groups tag along, the Internationalist Group marched in demonstrations calling for workers mobilizations to stop racist police and vigilante terror. Workers Revolution Will Avenge Trayvon Martin (25 July 2013) No to Gun Control: Racist Ruling-Class Ploy to Disarm the Population Who Controls the Guns? In the wake of the horrific Newtown school shooting and a shooting spree at a shopping center in Clackamas, Oregon this past December, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have joined with Republicans like New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the liberal media in launching a drive to tighten gun control laws. There is a division among the capitalist rulers over gun laws, but they all agree on intensified police repression across the board – as well as U.S. imperialist war in Afghanistan and murderous drone strikes in half a dozen countries. So-called “progressives” want to further strengthen the repressive apparatus by disarming the population. All historical evidence shows that “gun control” will not reduce violent crime or prevent rampages by deranged individuals. It will, however, embolden racist police rampages in impoverished African American, Latino, Asian and immigrant areas. The police are there to “serve and protect” the interests of the capitalist rulers and to keep their victims down. That’s why they want a monopoly on violence. Gun control has always targeted exploited populations in order to undercut their ability to resist. In the United States, from colonial times to today, it is an incontrovertible fact that gun control kills blacks. The Internationalist Group says no to gun control and other schemes to keep the working class and the oppressed disarmed in the face of a rapacious ruling class and its murderous, racist state. Who Controls the Guns? (April 2013) Bogalusa 1965: Deacons for Defense (April 2013)
Bring Out Workers’ Power to Stop “Stop and Frisk” Cold East Flatbush Police State: Racist NYPD Kills Again It Will Take Workers Revolution To Avenge Kimani Gray! On March 9, 16-year-old Kimani Gray was murdered in cold blood by two plainclothes NYPD cops, shot to death with three bullets to the back. Police officials praised it as a “good shooting.” Four days later, police arrested almost 50 people protesting this wanton killing. Councilman Jumaane Williams denounced “outside” forces for stirring up trouble. But it is the NYPD who shot an innocent youth, guilty of nothing, and have now turned East Flatbush into a police state. We demand that all arrested demonstrators be freed and the charges dropped, and call for police to get out. The murder of Kimani Gray will amplify the outcry against the NYPD’s racist “stop and frisk” policy, but the pressure groups linked to the Democratic Party only want to clean it up. Police brutality and black oppression will not be reformed away by cop watches, civilian review boards, civil rights lawsuits or lashing out in desperate acts of impotent rage. They are written into the bedrock of racist American capitalism. There should be a mass mobilization of union power along with the millions of oppressed black, Latino and immigrant residents against police brutality and murder. Not just another Sunday parade, but surround City Hall and really occupy Wall Street until the NYPD’s racist “stop and frisk” is stopped cold. East Flatbush Police State: Racist NYPD Kills Again (19 March 2013) Lynch Law U.S.A.: State Defends Murderer of Trayvon Martin Outrage over the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin compounds daily as the killer remains free, facing no criminal charges for gunning down the unarmed black youth from Miami Gardens, Florida. On February 26, George Zimmerman, a white self-appointed captain of a "neighborhood watch" team in a gated community in the Orlando suburb of Sanford, shot Martin, a black high-school student, who was returning to the home in the development where he and his father were staying. Police and local prosecutors never charged Zimmerman and accepted his cynical claim that he shot the unarmed youth in "self-defense." Thousands have demonstrated around the country, particularly after police tapes of 911 calls by Zimmerman were released, showing that he was stalking Martin. But the main thrust of liberals is to divert the protests into a movement for gun control laws and to get rid of "Stand Your Ground" laws. The ruling-class response seeks to take the heat off the police and tries to obscure the key fact that this was racist murder.Trayvon Martin was killed for the "crime" of "walking while black." Lynch Law U.S.A.: State Defends Murderer of Trayvon Martin (26 March 2012) Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Racist Cop Terror ILWU Shuts Ports Demanding Justice for Oscar Grant At 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit cop Johannes Mehserle stood over Oscar Grant and shot him in the back, killing the 22-year-old black man. It was the kind of cop murder, particularly of African American and Latino young men, that happens over and over in racist capitalist America. But last October 23, Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down the port of Oakland, California for the day shift and led a rally of 600 outside Oakland City Hall to protest the insulting “involuntary manslaughter” verdict against Mehserle (by a jury in Los Angeles on which there was not one black person) and demand “justice for Oscar Grant.” A number of left groups were pushing the slogan “Jail Killer Cops,” one of the main demands of the demonstration. The reformists are propagating the bourgeois democratic myth that under pressure, the state can be made to serve the interests of the masses. Still, although mainly symbolic, the ILWU action points toward a real mobilization of workers’ power in militant class struggle against the brutal enforcers of capitalist “law and order.” ILWU Shuts Ports Demanding Justice for Oscar Grant (April 2011) What “Post-Racial”
America?
Barack Obama vs. Black Liberation For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! The election of
Barack Obama as president of the United
States was widely hailed as the
culmination of the Civil Rights
movement. Obama’s
campaign was based on the illusion that
the United States had moved “beyond
race.” The ruling
class used the occasion to claim that
this proves that racism in the United
States has been overcome. But racist
discrimination and oppression are woven
into the fabric of American capitalism.
Racist police brutality is ever-present.
Obama and the Democratic Party political
operatives who shaped his election
campaign stayed away from any mention of
struggle against racism. Now black
people are being told to be patient. Yet
patience will not bring freedom any
closer for any sector of the oppressed.
Gains won through struggle can also be
taken back so long as social, economic
and political power remains in the hands
of capital. We only have to look at the
history of the Reconstruction period
following the Civil War. Installing a
black president won’t change the racist
nature of American capitalism, any more
than having Colin Powell as chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff made the
U.S. any less imperialist. Today,
“diversity” is being promoted as an
alternative to equality, which
capitalism cannot provide. Genuine
freedom and actual social, economic and
political equality for blacks in America
can only come about through a socialist
revolution. Barack
Obama
vs. Black Liberation (23 February
2009)
Mobilize Working-Class Struggle to Free Troy Now! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Troy Davis Must Not Die! There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts On October 24, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a last-minute stay of execution for Troy Anthony Davis. He had been scheduled to be murdered by the state of Georgia three days later. Now the deadline has been pushed back at most to November 18, but it could come well before then. Davis, a 40-year-old black man, was convicted of the murder of a Savannah police officer in 1989. His conviction rested solely on the testimony of witnesses. Since the trial, seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony, several saying they were coerced by the police into fingering Davis. Three witnesses have said that another man admitted to killing the policeman. That won’t even get Troy Davis a hearing, much less set aside the guilty verdict, under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton, which puts impossible limits on the admissibility of exculpatory evidence. Troy Davis is innocent, but Troy Davis is black and this is capitalist America, where black oppression is “enshrined” in the system of racist repression. The death penalty is a direct legacy of slavery. The power of the working class must be brought to bear, yet the labor bureaucracy and civil rights groups leaders are mobilizing their members and resources to vote for Democrat Barack Obama, who defends the death penalty. The Internationalist Group calls on working people and the oppressed to mobilize to stop this legal lynching, to free Troy Davis and abolish the barbaric death penalty! Troy Davis Must Not Die! (27 October 2008) Sean Bell Gunned Down on His Wedding Day – Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Police State Repression! 50 Bullets: Racist NYPD Cop Execution, Again In the early morning hours of November 25, a squad of New York City police surrounded a car of three unarmed black and Latino men, and unleashed a hail of 50 bullets. The killer cops murdered the driver, Sean Bell, on the day he was to marry his fiancée and badly wounded Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield. As the New York Police Department desperately tries to find someone to frame for the bloody crime their cops perpetrated, angry demonstrators recalled the 1999 murder of Amadou Diallo in the doorway of his home by a police death squad that fired off 41 shots. Democratic politicians rushed to line up behind Republican mayor Bloomberg to head off mass protests and keep a lid on New York. What’s needed is to mobilize power – the power of the multiracial working class along with black, immigrant and other oppressed “minority” populations who together are the overwhelming majority of New York – to put a stop to police brutality. And that will take nothing less than socialist revolution. 50 Bullets: Racist NYPD Cop Execution, Again (5 December 2006) New Orleans Police State “Ethnic Cleansing” American-style By now everyone knows that 100,000 people, overwhelmingly black and poor, were left to die in the New Orleans death trap. Why? Because the principal objective of the government at all levels was to occupy the devastated city and put the population under martial law. Today the Big Easy is a police-state encampment, occupied by an estimated 14,000 heavily armed troops and cops and private security companies. It is a first taste of long-standing plans by the U.S. bourgeoisie to “impose order” in America’s inner cities through preventive internal war against the exploited and oppressed. Bush cronies in companies like Halliburton, Bechtel and Fluor Corporation are cashing in, while the old-line families are working out plans for a new New Orleans that is “completely different ... demographically, geographically and politically.” In other words, a city “cleansed” of poor black people. This racist attack, like the war on Iraq, has been unleashed by both capitalist parties. To defeat it, it is necessary to break with all the bourgeois politicians and fight to build a revolutionary workers party. New Orleans Police State (20 September 2005) Hurricane Shows Race and Class Decide Who Lives and Dies in Capitalist America New Orleans Death Trap:
Thousands of
Black Poor Left to Die
We Need A Revolution! The
destruction in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
is being called the worst natural disaster in
U.S. history. But the devastation of New
Orleans was not natural, nor just the result
of callous, criminal neglect – it was mass
murder by the racist rulers of capitalist
America. The authorities knew exactly what
would happen in a major storm, and did nothing
to prevent catastrophic damage. They
knew the floodwall was vulnerable precisely at
the point it was breached. They
knew that over 100,000 people would be
stranded in the city, and they left them there
to die. In the aftermath, the survivors of
Hurricane Katrina have been held prisoner in
the flooded city. The hue and cry over looting
is a racist ploy: desparate flood survivors
scavenge for good while the oil companies loot
on a massive scale. As has frequently
happened through the ages, a natural
phenomenon laid bare the fault lines between
the classes in a rotting, decaying society.
The real response to this outrage is not to
call on criminals in power to improve
preparations for the next disaster, but to
fight for socialist revolution to bring down
the system that perpetuates war, racism and
poverty. New Orleans
Death Trap: Thousands of Black Poor Left to
Die (5 September 2005)
From Baghdad to
Harlem and Oakland: Imperialist War
Breeds Racist Cop Terror Alberta Spruill: Victim of NYPD Killer Elite Alberta Spruill is dead because she was black. The 57-year-old church-going city worker was preparing to leave for her job when a squad of New York cops burst in the door of her Harlem apartment without warning and threw a deafening flash grenade. Alberta had a heart condition and screamed that she couldn’t breathe. She died on the way to the hospital. These Gestapo-like no-knock raids are now routinely carried out in black, Latino and immigrant neighborhoods. Like the brutal police assault on antiwar protesters and longshore workers in Oakland last month, this war on working peopleand oppressed minorities is the domestic reflection of the imperialist war and colonial occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. The same day Alberta was murdered, layoff notices were sent to thousands of NYC workers. The power of the workers movement, at the forefront of all the oppressed, should be mobilized against killer cutbacks and racist cop terror. Alberta Spruill: Victim of NYPD Killer Elite (20 May 2003) Key Battle for Labor Rights and Black Freedom Defend the Charleston Five! Defeat the Racist Union-Busters with Hard Class Struggle The fight to defend the Charleston Five is a key battle linking labor struggle with the cause of black freedom. These members of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 are facing years in prison on federal charges of “felonious riot.” They are targets of a racist anti-union assault as the bosses seek to break a key outpost of black labor in the South, Charleston, the second largest port on the U.S. East Coast. On 20 January 2000, the unionists picketing a scab operation were set upon by 600 state and local riot cops and prison guards, who used tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades as well as armored cars, helicopters, sniper details, police boats and attack dogs. Three days before the police riot, ILA Local 1422 participated in a march of tens of thousands in Columbia, the state capital, demanding that the Confederate flag be taken down from above the statehouse. The brutal attack in Charleston was in good part a “payback” from the racist state government. In the face of the persecution of the Charleston Five and the escalating attack on union rights, what’s called for is a solid longshore strike to shut down all three coasts. Defend the Charleston Five! (June 2001)
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