NEW YORK CITY, May 10—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members demonstrated with workers, charged Daniel Penny, a white ex-marine for lynching Jordan Neely, a displaced Black worker-artist, with racist murder. Using a “banned” chokehold on the NYC subway May 1, bigoted Penny killed our class brother when he needed help the most. In an expression of class rage at the system that commits countless murders, we distributed over 200 CHALLENGEs, connecting Neely’s murder to capitalism and providing an alternative with the headline “May Day: Power to the Workers!”

Under communism, all workers would have safe housing and resources, instead of being discarded like trash if they cann’t produce profits. They wouldn’t have to seek shelter in subway cars and fall victim to mental illness and suffer from substance dependency. And they wouldn’t be galvanized to see other workers as their enemies.

Displaced workers not disposable
Neely was having an mental outburst when racist vigilante Penny lynched him. The bosses’ racist ridden system murdered Neely, and Penny dealt the deadly blow. The ruling class’s racist conditions brainwashed Penny into seeing a displaced Black man as disposable.

This crime represents the rise of fascism. U.S Imperialist bosses are going head to head in a desperate competition for the world’s resources. They will stop at no cost to defend their profits on the backs of workers. As more funding goes towards imperialist competition against Russia and China, the bosses are cutting even more critical services for workers-especially Black and Latin ones-and simultaneously increasing direct attacks on them.

Liberal pols response with fascism
Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul predictably released statements either trying to appear “neutral” or giving lip service to helping workers.

From one side of his mouth, racist Adams said, “we cannot just blanketly say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that” (Hell Gate, 5/4). Later, he said Neely was “Black, like me.”

But actions speak even louder. Adams just last year announced plans for a $2.8 billion spending cut to the Department of Homeless Services while increasing the NYPD budget to $11.1 billion (CItyLimits, 2/18/22). Last November, he issued a directive that emboldens city agencies and kkkops to involuntarily institutionalize anyone who “looks like” they are having a mental crisis.

It’s clear which class Adams serves. And it’s not the working class!

Meanwhile, Hochul played dumb: “I will look at it more closely to find out whether the state has a role.” Liberals love to present themselves as antiracists, but their actions and words always prove otherwise! They’re no better than these republicans spouting openly racist rhetoric about Neely. WIth Adams and Hochul’s plan to flood the trains with more kkkops and force the displaced into unsafe shelters, it’s clear the working class can’t rely on these bosses’ pawns to give us the support we need.

Capitalism attacks
This capitalist system in decay created the conditions for a racist Penny and a distressed Neely. Penny was stationed at Camp Lejeune during his time served. This is no coincidence, as the camp was tied to a Neo-Nazi plot to attack power substations (Fox 8, 4/18).

As capitalism spirals into crisis, low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class. But, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops and vigilantee racists to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers.

Workers rage justified, need PLP
Workers are outraged at Neely’s murder. At the Broadway-Lafayette station, where Neely was murdered, workers had a vigil and occupied the train tracks, chanting, “Justice for Jordan Neely.” The kkkops made arrests, and bruised and bloodied in a pindown.

To understand what’s to come, we just need to look at what happened after mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd. Many workers had desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Neely’s murder proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters. Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (usatoday, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets. The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high—were slaughtered by the cops.

That’s why we need to channel antiracist fightbacks into the class struggle, and build a movement to direct that anger into destroying capitalism and establishing a workers’ state. Otherwise the bosses will just redirect our fightbacks into more do-nothing reforms. The only way to bring safety for all workers is for us to run a communist society without these bloodsucking scum! Help us make that world a reality.