NEW YORK CITY—“Same enemy! Same fight! Workers of the world unite!” This chant filled the streets regularly in June in New York City, as Progressive Labor Party members and friends joined countless other workers and youth who took to the streets. The masses of antiracists have a path to choose: the road towards communist revolution or the road to reforming racist capitalism. For us, the answer is clear: abolish exploitation and build a world by the working class, for the working class.
Masses open to communist leadership
Rebellions have erupted across the U.S. and around the world in response to racist police terror. In NYC, every day of the month was marked by protests. From the Bronx to Brooklyn, the Party brought a class-conscious political understanding that called out capitalism as the system built off racism in need of destruction by communists.
At least five times we united in large PLP contingents with bullhorns to share this message by leading chants, giving speeches, taking over the streets, holding signs, having conversations, and distributing thousands of CHALLENGEs and fliers. We made new contacts and have begun involving them in Party study/action groups. Individually party members attended dozens of protests.
At one march, family members of those murdered by kkkops addressed the crowd. These included friends of PLP, who we have marched alongside for years. These friends once again provided much-needed political leadership when they sharply called for multi-racial unity to shut this racist system down. When a few reformist organizers led calls to “cut cut cut” the police budget, the crowd responded with more volume and energy when chanting, “No more cops!”
“How do you spell ‘murderer?’ N-Y-P-D” was also popular in many of the demonstrations. Workers are rejecting the idea that racist police are merely “a few bad apples” and seeing racist terror as inherent to policing. PLP chants that the Party has been spreading for decades in NYC have caught on as mass chants.
Comrade, not ally
Another march in the mostly Black and Latin neighborhoods of Uptown Manhattan focused on promoting “Black and brown unity.” PLP succeeded at times in shifting the tone away from limiting identity politics. Many embraced our chants, so much so that neighboring bullhorns (including those of mass organizations in which we have been involved) at times followed our message rather than persisting with nationalist chants.
PLP speeches advocated for international, multiracial unity of the working class, which was met with cheers and applause, even as one of our comrades boldly affirmed “I stand with you today to fight, not as your white-ally, but as your white comrade ready to burn this racist system down.” As Karl Marx said in Capital, “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”
On Juneteenth, protestors took over the Brooklyn Bridge and high school students led chants to shut the profit system down on two different megaphones. One high school comrade gave a speech about her experiences with the racist use of metal detectors at her school (see the same comrade’s speech at a protest the day before, page 3).
As fellow protestors saw the leadership of Black and Latin youth in our organization, many took copies of CHALLENGE.
What now?
Throughout all of these protests, we have seen a positive response to chants that push multiracial unity and call out capitalism. Less popular were revolutionary chants like, “Don’t vote, revolt!” This demonstrates the need to continue to struggle with workers over dead-end electoral politics. The danger for these movements is that, in the absence of a widely supported communist leadership, the liberal bosses will co-opt mass anger and funnel it towards reforming and supporting the system. The question to ask friends is: do we want to fight inside the system or outside the system of capitalism?
While calls to abolish the police are gaining popularity, capitalism requires police, and elections will never get rid of capitalism. Workers need to organize in a revolutionary communist party, the PLP, in order to abolish capitalism and police.

Tulsa, Oklahoma is the story of looting and dispossession. It is one of the countless massacres in the history of the United States, often skipped over in history class. It left behind untold suffering as thousands of Black residents were left homeless after three  days of racist terror and violence. As U.S. bosses celebrated  Independence Day, Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” rang even more true this year—“for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Early setbacks for Black-white unity
Tulsa, Oklahoma was one of the fastest growing towns during the oil boom of the early 1900’s. Jim Crow laws were among Oklahoma’s first legal acts after statehood and segregation was more complete in Tulsa than it was in most other American cities (see Death in the Promised Land by Scott Ellsworth).
Both the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Oklahoma Socialist Party had active chapters in Tulsa . Both had Black members and called for multi-racial unity. Their slogan was “raise our wages.” The IWW had been leading strikes in Texas and had attempted to organize in the oil fields in Tulsa. They were clearly a threat to local bosses and politicians. But, in 1917 the police raided the local union hall, arresting 17  IWW members who were later brought up on various phony  charges.
In an editorial from the local bosses press, the World, the advice was “All is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad.” Found guilty after a short trial, IWW members were attacked on their way to county jail, by a Klan type group, Knights of Liberty. With the help of the police, the union men were tied to a tree, whipped and tortured. That evening signs were posted- Notice to IWW’s Don’t Let The Sun Set On You in Tulsa. The Tulsa Klan boasted a “thriving chapter” in 1921 with chapters for men, women, and even boys. In Tulsa county, both the Republican and Democratic candidates for county attorney were Klansmen (Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest by Charles Alexander).  They were not about to have union organizers who believed in Black-white unity in their midst.
Bosses unleash a reign of terror
From May 31-June 1, 1921 the Black community in Tulsa experienced what can only be described as a reign of terror. After rumors that a 19 year old Black man, Dick Rowland, had attempted to assault a 17 year old white woman, Sarah Paige, in an elevator were published in the Tulsa Tribune, thousands of white men, with the aid and direction  of the cops and city leaders , were deputized and armed.
In  the course of one day they  burned down one  square mile of a suburb called Greenwood, later to be nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” Homes and shops were destroyed. Black residents were shot down in the street. Both the National Guard and local cops joined the attack, dropping sticks of dynamite and firing machine guns. Local Black towns came under the surveillance of “airborne reconnaissance.” A brave but unsuccessful armed defense of the community was led by Black World War I veterans. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote- “We went to fight. We came back fighting.”
Thousands of Black residents spent the winters of 1921/1922 in flimsy tents. According to an investigation by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, almost 300 Black people were killed and 6,000 Black men were jailed. Some men stayed in jail for as long as eight  days. Martial law was declared, Black people were rounded up at gunpoint and taken to refugee camps. They could only travel if issued a green pass (Tulsa Race War by  R Haliburton, Jr.).
The only solution is communist revolution
The use of violence against the working class, especially Black and Latin workers is ongoing and constant. There are hundreds of examples of massacres by the U.S. government dating back to the 1700s. Teaching about Tulsa, or Rosewood, or the Red Summer of 1919 forces the question- what kind of system do we live under? Why would we not unite together to build a better system where workers’ needs are met without grinding others under foot? Who wouldn’t want to be able to live in union with workers regardless of perceived differences? Communist revolution is the only solution for a multi-racial, united, and free working class.  A world where there is food, housing and work for all is possible The Progressive Labor Party fights for this, join us!

The following editorial has been written by comrades in Mexico to warn the international working class about the dangers of identity politics and liberalism.

From Atlanta, Georgia to Oaxaca, Mexico, the capitalist bosses are using identity politics and sell-out misleaders to try to pacify the angry masses. But as millions have rebelled around the world, more and more demonstrators are seeing that the problem isn’t just a few “bad” cops. Racist violence is an integral part of the capitalists’ racist profit system, a state apparatus that protects the bosses’ profits by exploiting, dividing, and terrorizing the international working class.
Amid a global pandemic and economic depression, as the rulers’ callous greed and glaring weaknesses are exposed, many protesters are embracing communist ideas. They’re coming to see that all politicians and cops are our class enemies, regardless of their skin color. And that only a mass, multiracial organization, led by communist politics and the most militant Black and Latin workers, can smash the capitalist system, the source of all racism and inequality. Our inspirational unity in this fightback is the bosses’ worst nightmare.
A lynching in Atlanta
On June 15, the racist Atlanta police shot to death a 27-year-old Black man, Rayshard Brooks.  His crime? Falling asleep in his car in the drive-through lane at a Wendy’s restaurant. The cops’ lynching of Brooks reignited the anger of Black, Latin, Asian, and white workers, who burned the restaurant to the ground.
The U.S. finance capital Big Fascists are desperately straining to quell the revolt by channeling it into electoral politics and promoting Black politicians who serve the racist bosses and their system. In Atlanta, the most prominent misleaders include Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Congressman John Lewis, and former Mayor Andrew Young, who recently invoked the racist slogan “All Lives Matter” and recalled the time he attempted a “reconciliation” with members of the Ku Klux Klan (New York Times, 6/19).
These bosses’ puppets are much like the Black politicians in South Africa, who work hand in hand with the old white apartheid ruling class to keep exploiting and killing Black workers. They promote the lie that the working class can fight the bosses’ racism by electing politicians who “look like them.”
The politicians’ opportunism is nothing new. Shortly after the current rebellion was sparked by the May 25 strangulation murder of George Floyd, a massive and integrated group of young workers took to the Atlanta streets. They burned a police precinct and attacked the offices of CNN, whose founder, Ted Turner, is a billionaire backer of Bottoms. Instead of blaming her police for viciously assaulting the protesters, the mayor berated Black youth for the violence. She was following the playbook of ex-Stooge in Chief Barack Obama, who attacked the young Baltimore rebels as “thugs” after the cops executed 25-year-old Freddie Gray in 2015.When the young Atlanta rebels ignored Bottoms and the demonstrations kept growing, she was forced to fire six cops caught on tape tasering two Black college students and dragging them out of their car. A local Black prosecutor then brought murder charges against killer kkkop Garrett Rolfe, who shot Brooks twice in the back. In a racist response, dozens of Atlanta police—the so-called “good cops”—called in sick to protest.
Last year, when workers weren’t out in the streets, Bottoms showed her true loyalties after a Black police officer on her own security detail shot and killed an 18-year-old Black youth, D’Ettrick Griffin, for sliding into the cop’s unoccupied, unmarked car at a gas station. With the mayor’s backing, the cop, Oliver Simmonds, was let off by the district attorney. It didn’t matter that Atlanta specifically forbids the police from shooting at unarmed people, even if they’re fleeing (AJC, 2/8/2019). Bottoms then rewarded the police with a salary increase to “allow them to live in the city of Atlanta” (CBS News, 6/18). As if having killers as our neighbors makes us safer!
Atlanta is a majority-Black city with an uninterrupted string of Black mayors since 1974. Together they have cleared the way for gentrification by pushing out  Black workers (AJC, 5/9/2019). Though the city is known as a haven for Black capitalists, it has the worst racist inequality of any city in the U.S. In 2018, the “lowest 20 percent in Atlanta earned an average of $9,400, while the highest 20 percent brought home more than $256,000.” The majority of the local Black working class lives in poverty (Statista.com, 11/27/2019).
AMLO punches right
In Mexico, the bosses have used identity politics to put down workers’ fury and rebellion against extreme poverty and racist attacks against our class. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the assassinations by cops of Giovanni Lopez, a construction worker from Jalisco, for the “crime” of not wearing a face mask, and of Alexander Martinez, a 16-year-old from Oaxaca.  In Mexico City, riot police kicked a young woman of 16 until she was unconscious and hospitalized. All were casualties of the class war between the oppressed, the excluded, and the debt-ridden, on the one hand, and those who protect the bosses and write the laws to guarantee the capitalists’ maximum profit, on the other.
The fightback against these killers and their governing accomplices has been blunted by the popularity of the fake-leftist Morena Party and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Trading on his identity as a mestizo, a person of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, AMLO has exploited the despair of the poorest of the population, who live day after day with the violence of the cartels and mining companies and ruthless bosses. The president has deployed the National Guard (NG) as a false promise of “public safety” from corrupt politicians and federal police who collude with drug traffickers. Formed out of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, and the federal police, the NG is a forceful warrior battalion that for decades has committed abuses against the population while smashing social protest.
As AMLO rivals U.S. Terrorist in Chief Donald Trump for mishandling the Covid-19 crisis, and racist capitalist inequality in Mexico only gets worse, the president makes phony speeches against capitalism. AMLO feints with his left and punches the working class with his right. His façade as a self-made “common man,” based in part on his mestizo identity, has deceived large sections of the working class to support big-money ruling class projects—like the Trans-Isthmus Corridor and the Mayan Train—that previous presidents only dreamt of.
A massacre in Oaxaca
In 2006, in Oaxaca, the working class experienced firsthand the danger of being represented by and supporting mestizo politicians. After teachers led a massive rebellion for improved working conditions throughout the Central Valley, and gained control of Oaxaca City, they were violently suppressed by an intervention of the military, disguised as police officers. But in reality, the movement’s fatal weakness was the influence of class traitors like Santiago Chepi and Flavio Sosa, who assumed leadership within the teachers’ movement and ultimately diverted the strength of the rebellion into negotiations with the government (https://tinyurl.com/y9dnamro). Like most teachers in Oaxaca, Chepi and Sosa came from working-class mestizo families. After betraying the movement and bringing it back under the bosses’ control, Chepi and Sosa promised to push for reforms as elected representatives in Oaxaca’s municipal government. After accomplishing nothing, Chepi and Sosa created more false hope and then widespread cynicism through the election of sell-out liberals like Gabino Cue as governor of the state of Oaxaca, a disaster for the working class. Cue intensified the bosses’ attack against the teachers, which culminated in the 2016 massacre at Nochixtlan. After teachers and students’ parents blocked highways, the police slaughtered at least six workers and injured more than a hundred more (La Jornada, 12/19/16).
Unite in communist solidarity
For the future of our class, workers in the current anti-racist movement must reject the bosses’ use of identity politics that leads to pacifism, liberal fascism, and inter-imperialist war against our class sisters and brothers. We have a better alternative: to unite with Progressive Labor Party and pour all of our anger and energy into building a multiracial, multigenerational party of women and men, Black, Latin, Asian, and white. To build an international communist party that brings us shoulder to shoulder against a system that oppresses and kills in the interests of capital.
We are dedicated to fighting for the international working class. Through our newspaper, CHALLENGE, our study groups and cadre schools, but most of all through political leadership in struggle with masses of anti-racist workers, PLP keeps alive the flame of communist ideas from Oaxaca to Atlanta, from Bogota to Mexico City and beyond. Don’t vote, revolt! Join Progressive Labor Party!

The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie…What is correct develops in the course of struggle with what is wrong.
– Mao Zedong

The mass antiracist rebellion sparked by the murder of George Floyd has brought to the light what Black and Latin workers have always known, the role of the police is to terrorize the working class, particularly Black workers. The police cannot be reformed because in killing Black workers they are doing their job to maintain capitalism.
“Defund the Police” has become a mass slogan of the rebellion. Millions of young people around the world are demanding a world with no cops. The capitalists will never do this. Capitalism is based on the bosses exploiting the working class for profit. The bosses use both racism and the police to maintain this system. Racism is used to justify low wages and keep the working class divided. The police enforce racism and the laws that protect exploitation. People are not equal before the eyes of the law because the law is there to maintain inequality. The bosses steal billions every day, it’s called business. The laws are there to protect them. Capitalism and equality are incompatible.
The whole history of the police is one of defending the bosses’ interests by attacking the working class. Capturing escaped slaves, terrorizing Black neighborhoods, portraying Black and Latin workers as dangerous, breaking strikes of all workers and protecting what the bosses have stolen from us are why the police exist. The bosses need the cops to protect them and their racist system like fish need water.
The bosses build racism, mistrust and fear among our class to divide us and turn us towards the police. The bosses' racism and anti-working-class ideology help keep us oppressed.  But our class does have experience liberating ourselves. The struggle of the working class in China shows we can build a society based on trusting the working class. The working class in China under the leadership of the communist party built a society without cops. This was not some small experiment, but a massive transformation of a society that involved 600 million people.
No exploitation – No need for cops
From the 1940’s to 60’s the world was inspired by the working class in China fighting for communism, even as the capitalists re-established themselves in the Soviet Union. The Progressive Labor Party came out of this struggle and today we fight for communism even as capitalism has returned to China. The revolutionary war against the Chinese capitalists lasted from 1946 to 1949. During this period the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established liberated zones of workers’ power under the leadership of the CCP. The zones were bases for the working class led by the CCP to both build a workers state and direct the ongoing war against the capitalists for state power across the whole of China. In these zones the capitalist legal structure was eliminated and replaced with a political system that relied on the working class. This system of collective working-class society carried over into the period after the revolution and was maintained at some level until the return of capitalism in the 1970’s.
The CCP replaced the complex system of laws that protected exploitation with a straightforward code of comradely behavior based on serving the people. The police and courts were replaced by workers’ meetings led by the CCP where problems between ordinary people were worked out. Guidelines, such as put the needs of the people before your own, treat people in a comradely way, be honest with your comrades and work to build a socialist society, could be applied by groups of workers to look at any situation that arose.
The CCP “system relied heavily on education and persuasion rather than force and upon the use of social pressure rather than governmental power. [It] stressed the importance of internalizing how to be part of society and pointed out the ineffectiveness of using fear of punishment.” Each individual was deeply involved in dealing with problems and enforcing the solutions. There were no police or formal courts. (China Quarterly, a British journal of research on China, Oct – Dec 1970)
On resolving contradictions among the people: "unity-criticism-unity" CCP slogan
The revolution in China did not eliminate selfish thinking and other problems between people. Undoing exploitation and building  a collective society allowed problems like stealing, fights and disputes to be handled constructively.
Daily life was organized into collectives and people dealt with problems. Communist “cadre [or leaders] organized the meetings. These cadre were instructed to rely on the masses. Any individual could air grievances and have the group take up the problem by appealing directly to the [Party] collectives.” (China Quarterly Oct – Dec 1970) The ideology was based on confidence in workers to build and strengthen society through collective struggle based on criticism and self-criticism. The goal in resolving the dispute was to strengthen the comrades and strengthen society.
In the book Fanshen, about the building of socialism in China, a man attacked someone in his town after a heated argument. The man was tackled and held by people in the town until a meeting was organized. At the meeting the man was confronted by his comrades who criticized him. In the meeting it came out that he had been encouraged in the attack by the leaders of the local Catholic Church whose land had been distributed to the workers  in the town. The meeting decided that the bigger problem was the church and the attacker could be a productive member of the town and assigned him to work for 15 days on the land of a soldier who was on the front lines.
Under capitalism people try to create alternatives to the police. These efforts help combat the racist lies pushed by the bosses and build unity and confidence in our class. In Minneapolis a Native American group, AIM started neighborhood patrols to document police violence against indigenous workers. It grew into looking out for people in the neighborhood in a broader way. The group started by “walking the streets deterring both police and intra-community violence by intervening or simply bearing witness…[the organization] has expanded the definition of patrol duties to include cooking hot breakfasts for the unhoused and checking on overlooked neighbors” (Mother Jones, 6/13/20)
The limits of these situations is that capitalism requires cops. Until we unite under a revolutionary communist strategy, the bosses will succeed in finding ways to undermine people’s confidence in each other through the elevation of racism and real or instigated disputes. This is why the CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) in Seattle, another example of the working-class rejecting police oppression, can only be temporary. The working class needs to be organized as a communist party. To end police attacks requires ending exploitation.
Make revolution and keep working on it
The bad ideas of capitalism, racism, sexism, selfishness, individualism etc. are deeply ingrained in all of us. Even under a working-class communist society undoing 500 years of capitalism will take a long time and a lot of struggle. The reason communism can tackle these problems is because it is a society based on the needs of the working class. Our class has a profound interest in unity and ending exploitation. Racist terror is essential to capitalism. The police are the front-line forces of the bosses in carrying out that terror.J