CHICAGO, Jun 15—On a 100-degree afternoon, 100 students, parents, and workers marched through the south side Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago in the fifth annual “We Walk For Her” march organized to bring awareness to the Black and Latin women and girls that have gone missing because of sexist violence. This deadly sexism and racism is part and parcel of a system based on profit and exploitation.
Militant students led the action, from chants to marshaling the march. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members marched with dozens of workers and distributed fliers and CHALLENGE. Workers were receptive to our message of communist revolution and a worker-run society as being the only solution to the countless attacks that the international working class faces daily. Many took the Party’s literature and engaged in deep discussions in the blazing heat.
A system flooded with racist and sexist violence
Chicago has tragically been home to an increasing number of murders of women workers, the majority of them Black. These deaths have spanned from the South to West sides where the most vulnerable Black and brown working-class people live. Chicago’s long history of racist discrimination has facilitated the unsolved and forgotten fate of our working-class sisters.
The capitalist kkkops and kourts, far from protecting women workers, are some of the worst abusers, guilty of terrorizing, incarcerating, and murdering them! Having Lori Lightfoot as the city’s first Black gay woman mayor has done nothing to alter this state-sponsored violence, and no politician ever will. The bosses make billions of dollars in profits from racist and sexist super exploitation, and the role of the state is to manage and ensure that. They are not neutral, nor do they have the interests of the working class at heart.
As capitalism spirals into chaos, it has become a free for all, with violence against workers on the rise, and Black women taking the brunt. In May, a 36-year old Black woman was found chained up in an abandoned building after screaming in order to get the neighbors attention (Block Club Chicago, 5/23). Also in May, a teenager from Chicago was found by hotel workers in a hotel in Tuscaloosa, Alabama after she had been sex-trafficked (WVTM-13, 5/23). In both instances, it was not politicians, the kkkops or capitalists with many institutions at their disposal that found these Black women; it was other workers who stood up and did something.
Black trans women workers have faced relentless attacks in Chicago, often times going missing and later found to be murdered by men who let the dehumanizing alienation and sexism abundant under the profit system to determine their actions.
A system that perpetuates violence and inequality against women and young girls should not exist. The political and economic system of capitalism is designed to do just that! In 2020, there were over 200,000 women under the age of 21 who were reported missing (Dame, 1/10).
Black women account for less than 15 percent of the U.S. population but more than one third of all missing women. The racist and sexist foundation of capitalism in the U.S. would have it no other way.
Lessons from Claudia Jones, Black communist woman leader
In 1949, revolutionary Black communist Claudia Jones wrote and published the pamphlet An End To The Neglect Of The Problems Of The Negro Woman! where she laid forward the argument that the struggles faced by Black women workers had been not only ignored obviously by the capitalists, but also by the left and the Communist Party USA. This racist and sexist indifference occurred despite the fact that Black women were a super-exploited labor force and gave outsized but often unrecognized leadership to the international working-class movement. Her sharp insight back then guides how we build the struggle today.
The leadership of Black women workers is key, and it holds true today when we witness their fearless fightback during the 2020 antiracist uprisings, to the strikes in healthcare currently erupting in Zimbabwe and in textile factories in Haiti. Black women workers regularly face the most brutal exploitation and oppression under capitalism, and for this reason are a section of the working class best suited to be leaders in the fight for revolution.
PLP is organizing to build this new egalitarian communist society, but it will not happen until many more working-class people decide to rise up and break the chains of capitalism. Bold leadership is essential to fighting back, but only communism is able to smash sexist exploitation and violence at their root and establish an egalitarian society. The international PLP invites workers here in Chicago and everywhere else to join us in building this fight!