BAY AREA, CA—Thousands of cars and bicyclists caravanned through Oakland on May 31 to protest George Floyd’s racist murder and those of many others by the kkkcops. Floyd was executed in a public lynching. His murderer, Derek Chauvin—the subject of 18 complaints and three previous shootings of suspects, one fatal—has been charged with murder.
The May 31 caravan involved many younger workers, Black, Latin, Asian and white. The mass rage against racism is thrilling.
Progressive Labor Party had 8 cars, 17 people in the caravan. We got our message out with posters and red flags. We distributed CHALLENGE and over 200 PLP leaflets condemning police murder and calling for revolution. Stuck in the massive multiracial "rush hour," we talked to people in cars alongside us. One immigrant worker from El Salvador reminded us that the U.S. military had armed and trained the Salvadoran military and criminal gangs to terrorize rebelling workers in El Salvador just as the police function in the U.S. Capitalism rules with racist terror all over the world.
The Oakland caravan was part of a multiracial uprising against racist police murder. The San Francisco Bay Area has seen demonstrations every day—in Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, and elsewhere—of tens of thousands of Black, Latin, Asian, white and indigenous workers. These marches echo the response of millions of workers worldwide to this racism. The police responded violently to non-violent protests. 15,000 high school students, parents and teachers protested police murders in Oakland on June 1. Unprovoked, cops tear gassed them and shot rubber bullets—before the curfew of 8 PM. They did the same in San Jose on May 31.
 Psychologists and the legal system defend racist cops
The Department of Justice and District Attorneys have protected fascist police who kill us. In 2015, psychologist William Lewinski toured the U.S. training cops to kill and rely on him to take care of the legal end. In the last decade, he had testified or consulted in 200 legal cases defending police accused of murder. His company, Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers to shoot pre-emptively before they see a gun (New York Times, 8/2/2015). Fearing our class unity, the bosses call protestors looters. They plant rock-throwing window-busting provocateurs to discredit them.
Can we organize workers to overthrow capitalism and its state and create a communist society? Workers’ response to George Floyd’s racist murder by cops tells us, “YES.” Our job is to take our message to workers: capitalism needs racism, and racist police terror is part of what holds the capitalists in power. Only communism can end this.
Workers unite against racism
U.S. capitalism was built on racism: divide Black, white and indigenous workers and keep the rulers on top (see The Road not Taken by Lerone Bennett)
Black and Latin workers are exploited and oppressed far more than white workers, particularly white male workers; this creates millions of super-profits for the capitalist class (see page 4). All workers experience the horrors of life under capitalism: job insecurity, pandemics, wars, inadequate wages, bad medical care, false arrest, police murder and homelessness. Black, Latin, indigenous, Asian, and immigrant workers—especially women—have far worse conditions, but these horrors affect all workers.
We need to unite as comrades in the struggle against capitalism. When one group of workers is stratified, isolated and attacked to create a “low wage group of the reserved army of labor,” all workers suffer from lower wages and worse living conditions.
Loyal to our class rather than “race,” workers can overcome divisions. We need to see through this divisive strategy and unite to fight for the needs of all. This means a communist world, a world where we work to serve one another’s needs, not the bosses’ profits. As Marx said a century ago, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin, where in the black it is branded.”