Chicago, July 14—Screams and chants filled the air—along with bottles and debris—as workers from the South Shore neighborhood rebelled after the Chicago Police Department’s racist killing of Harith “Snoop” Augustus, a 37-year-old barber and father of a five-year-old daughter.
Harith was stopped by police for “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person.” CPD body cam footage shows Harith talking to a cop on the sidewalk. According to a witness interviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times, they were arguing over whether Harith was selling loose cigarettes. As the dispute escalated, a swarm of cops descended upon Harith. One grabbed his wrist. When Harith pulled away, his holstered weapon was revealed. He began running into the street and stumbled as Chicago’s killer cops opened fire and shot him in the back.
It’s the same old capitalist story: Chicago police murdered Harith Augustus.
This is the second racist murder of a young Black worker and father at the hands of the CPD in as many months. On June 6, in the Bronzeville neighborhood, the cops cut down 24-year-old Maurice Granton, shooting him six times in the back. Both Bronzeville and South Shore are historically Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. They are being rapidly gentrified amid development in nearby Jackson Park of the Obama Presidential Center, a three-building complex including a library and museum. The Obama Foundation has refused to sign a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that would bar displacement of longtime community residents because of the development. Barack Obama himself has been silent about these latest racist murders in his adopted hometown.
The South Shore rebellion ignited almost immediately after Harith was murdered. Police swarmed the neighborhood to try to intimidate the working class. But the workers didn’t back down. In the resulting standoff, the CPD attacked unarmed workers and activists with batons. The cops arrested four activists, primarily from the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), an organization founded shortly after the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. Incubated at the University of Chicago and funded by the Ford Foundation, two elite institutions of the U.S. ruling class, BYP100 began as a research project to examine “the attitudes, resources, and culture of African American youth ages 15 to 25” in regard to civic engagement (blackyouthproject.com). The bosses’ nonprofit reform groups can never be revolutionary organizations dedicated to the liberation of the working class. Progressive Labor Party is the tool of the working class to liberate ourselves from the noose of capitalism.
After the arrests, BYP100 correctly called on everyone to march to the police station where the four people were being held, the same station where the cop who murdered Harith is based. About 70 of us immediately took the street and started to march. At two points along the way, after BYP leadership heard that their members had been freed, they stopped the march and “asked” the other marchers: “Should we keep going (to the station) or turn around?” Each time, workers disagreed with the idea that they stop. On the second occasion, an older Black worker from South Shore came to the front and said, “Y’all asked us to march and we followed you. Ain’t no turning back now, y’all can go back if you want.”
PLP immediately went up to the worker and said he was right and that we would be following his leadership moving forward. We called on the crowd to keep going and most folks came with us, including the BYP100 members. This was another example of why we must have confidence in workers to make the right decisions. In some instances, PLP will have the opportunity to lead our class; in others, we will follow their lead.
In the days following Harith’s murder, there have been more protests and demonstrations. On Sunday, July 15, PLP joined a demonstration, got out copies of CHALLENGE, and made contacts. The following day, more than 500 Black, Latin, white, and Asian workers and youth marched to protest both the murder of Augustus and the cops’ brutal attack on the demonstrators. It was called by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a mass organization that some comrades are working in. The group’s response to the torture and murderous history of the racist CPD is to demand an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). They say their goal is to give the community “control” over the police and their contract—yet another dead-end reform.
Since 1948, Chicago has had a long history of “civilian oversight” and “police accountability” boards that have consistently failed to stop—or even properly investigate—racist police murders. An elected CPAC would mean more politicians—the capitalist bosses’ stooges—overseeing a ruling-class institution whose very purpose is to control and terrorize the working class.
At another rally that ended at the barbershop where Harith worked, a speaker called for the community to put its arms around Harith’s family and to contribute toward funeral expenses. Again, hundreds of CHALLENGE’s were distributed.
At the monthly police board meeting, Black police chief Eddie Johnson was confronted about Harith’s murder. There was also a demonstration at the home of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has tried to pacify workers by asking them to “lower their voices and listen to other voices” (abc7chicago.com, 7/17).
But the anger among Black workers in Chicago goes far beyond this latest killing. They are rebelling against the devastation and dismantling of communities that are riddled by racist unemployment and racist school closings. There is only one solution for our class sisters and brothers: communist revolution!
Our Party must grow and become active in our communities as we fight to build a culture of multiracial working-class unity. We must denounce divisions based on nationalism, voting wards, gang lines, or race. We are fighting for an international working class that has yet to imagine its potential. We have a world to win!
Capitalism will never be able to guarantee an acceptable level of health for the overwhelming majority of the working class. By transforming essential medical services like prescription drugs and surgery into commodities to buy and sell for profit, the capitalist bosses who run healthcare ensure that if workers and their families can’t pay, disease, disability, and death are the common consequences.
The city of Chicago, despite having a booming health care industry valued close to $70 billion, has led the way in using racist attacks as the cutting edge to decrease the overall health of workers across the region. From racist police murder to the closure of health care facilities that serve mostly Black and immigrant workers, the city has mirrored the overall trend of capitalism in denying even a remotely healthy existence to an increasing number of our class.
This will continue to be the harsh reality until the international working masses, led by the Progressive Labor Party, overthrow the profit system through violent revolution and establish a worker-led communist society in its place. Only then will workers live in a world not only where health care access is guaranteed for all, but where the social problems that lead to racist and sexist health outcomes are eradicated through collectivity and organizing the masses.
Racist capitalist unemployment leads to death, mental illness
The racism inherent under capitalism, which is used by the bosses to divide workers so that they can maximize profit, inevitably leads to racist inequalities in health. Conservative estimates place the unemployment rate for Black men between the ages of 20-24 in Chicago to be nearly 40 percent (Chicago Tribune, 5/12). This scarcity of jobs funnels thousands of Black youth into a street economy, exposing them to inter-gang violence. As of July 15, over 271 people have been killed and over 1,500 have been shot in the city (Chicago Tribune, 7/16).
Beyond just the physical and emotional toll that this violence inflicts on the immediate victim, is the ripple effect in mental health that occurs in the Black and Latin communities of the city where the majority of the shootings occur. A study sample of Black women in a neighborhood on the city’s south side showed a rate of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nearing 60 percent. A significant portion of those diagnosed with PTSD in the study reported having a loved one directly impacted by physical violence (Chicago Magazine, 12/16/16). This violence stems ultimately from capitalism and its government, often directly in the case of police shootings.
For those workers who would hope to access some mental health resources to help deal with this type of intense strain that capitalism causes, liberal racist Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other Democratic Party city bosses ensured years ago that very few if any are available to those working-class communities most directly affected. The Hill reports:
Illinois cut $113.7 million in funding for mental health services from 2009 to 2012, which resulted in closing two inpatient facilities, six of twelve mental health clinics and several community health agencies. Four of the six agencies that closed were on the South and West sides of the city, where the majority of violence occurs, and where such services are desperately needed (6/26/17).
Instead of mental health clinics, more and more workers are funneled into Cook County Jail, the fourth largest jail in the U.S., where at least one-third of the inmates have a diagnosed mental illness (WTTW, 11/2/17).
Bosses shred safety net, attack immigrant workers
The Cook County Health and Hospitals System, a city-run network that provides medical services to the city’s working class, uninsured/underinsured, and undocumented workers and their families, proposed cuts to the 2018 budget in upwards of $10 million dollars (Chicago Sun-Times, 11/17/17). These cuts were deemed “necessary” by the racist city bosses, who state they need to cover a $200 million dollar deficit after the county’s anti-worker, sweetened beverage tax scheme crashed and burned at the end of last year (See CHALLENGE, 10/27/17).
The racist CEOs of the city’s “safety net” hospitals, such as Dr. Jay Shannon of Stroger Hospital and Karen Teitelbaum of Mount Sinai Hospital, have the nerve to make statements about how much they “care” about undocumented workers in press releases. Meanwhile, they attack those very same workers by cutting services that they claim are not “cost-effective,” like when both hospitals shuttered their inpatient pediatrics units in 2017. Abrupt changes such as these force immigrant workers to lose familiar health care providers as well as travel farther distances to private healthcare systems which are less likely to accept insurance programs such as Medicaid.
This lack of access can make the difference of life and death for workers who face worsening health problems related to the ongoing threat of raids and arrests via the massive deportation apparatus of the capitalist ruling class. Even though the Chicago liberal bosses tout the status of “sanctuary city,” this flimsy designation hasn’t protected scores of the undocumented from the reality of deportation, including over 150 immigrant workers who were rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over a six-day period in May (Washington Post, 5/29).
The heightened sense of anxiety and stress of living under these fascist conditions not only contributes to an increased incidence of chronic conditions such as hypertension and mental illness; it also decreases the likelihood that immigrant workers will feel comfortable going to a medical facility and voluntarily offering up personal information for fear that it will be used by authorities for deportation.
Such is the nature of this racist, sexist profit system: making it nearly as impossible for our class to live healthily as it is to seek treatment. As communists in PLP, we say that a system that can’t guarantee healthcare for workers doesn’t deserve to exist!
Building communist revolution essential to workers’ health
Although the overall trend of healthcare access and health outcomes, in Chicago and beyond, reflects growing racist inequality for our class, workers and students in the city continue to challenge the bosses and their system through militant fightback. A collective of community activists, mostly Black youth from the city’s south side, led a protracted campaign over recent years that forced the bosses to re-open a trauma center at the University of Chicago. University public health students have published research and organized teach-ins and rallies around racist police violence as a public health crisis. Hospital workers throughout the greater city area have built the fight through their healthcare unions to demand safer staffing, higher wages, and affordable health insurance plans from the hospital bosses. Comrades from PLP have been in the thick of many of these struggles, offering leadership and a communist political analysis whenever possible.
The phenomenal gains in worker life expectancy, infant and mother mortality, and public health that occurred after the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries won state power must continue to inspire us to build these struggles against the capitalists and their deadly system. The concept of health was no longer individualized with a price tag; it was understood as something not to be connected to money and profit, but rather the experience of collective development and struggle. When millions and millions of workers are won again to this truly revolutionary outlook, our future will be very healthy indeed.
LOS ANGELES, July 14—The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) strengthened its ranks against fascism at this year’s Summer Project. The theme was “Fighting Fascism in all its Forms.” A PLP Summer Project is an opportunity for comrades and friends from around the world to unite for intense political work in support of existing struggles to build communist understanding and PLP (see first-hand accounts on page 6).
We began with a lively orientation where we learned about the week ahead of us. Our first reading was the foreword to German communist Karl Billinger’s Fatherland (1935). The foreword clearly states that we have two choices: following the road to fascism or fighting for communism. After team building activities and icebreakers, we made posters and chant sheets for the different antiracist actions planned for later in the week. We concluded our first day with a communist barbecue and card games. At every turn, collectivity was at work.
Study fascism
Every morning began with a study group. The topics were What is Fascism?, Racism and Fascism, and How to Fight Fascism. We aimed to improve our understanding of the world and what that means for our daily struggles on the job and in our mass organizations.
A small group also got a chance to learn more about writing and editing for CHALLENGE. CHALLENGE is the main way we share struggles in our mass organizations and our communist analysis of the world with our base, ourselves, and the rest of the international working class. We must share what we learned and fight for more comrades to write, edit, and translate for the paper.
We also had a movie showing and discussion of Who is Dayani Cristal? This documentary showed the difficult and sometimes deadly journey that migrant workers from Central America take to come to the United States.
Fight fascism
We supplemented our study of fascism by fighting the rising features of fascism in Los Angeles. This is mainly in the form of antiracist protests against the racist terror machinery that is the capitalist government: the Kops, the Kourts, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Our first action was a victory for the Anaheim 3, the antiracists who fought the Ku Klux Klan. PL’ers and other antiracist fighters rallied outside the courthouse and then packed the courts. In the courtroom we cheered for a victory that took two and half years of struggle to achieve (for more details see CHALLENGE, 7/25).
The following day, we rallied outside of District Attorney (DA) Jackie Lacey’s office. She is the first woman and Black DA for Los Angeles County who was just re-elected. Lacey refuses to indict killer cops from the LAPD and LA County Sheriffs who have killed Ezell Ford, Omar Abrego, Brendan Glenn, CJ Snell, and Anthony Weber, just to name a few.
We called out DA Lacey and the capitalist criminal injustice system for its constant racist attacks on the working class, especially Black and Latin workers. During our rally we met some antiracists from the #OccupyICE encampment.
Our final rally was in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center where an #OccupyICE encampment has been in place for almost a month. Some of them joined our picket line. As we made speeches and chanted, detained workers beat their cell walls in solidarity. One held up a sign from her small window that read, “No ICE.” That along with the honks of solidarity from workers driving by showed us that workers are open to communist ideas and are ready for more.
Build the Party
At all of these actions, we chanted, made speeches on the bullhorn, and distributed CHALLENGE. Some workers made bullhorn speeches for the first time. The actions, study groups, and recreation were planned collectively.
Summer Projects are a way PLP shows how communists live and work together. We strengthen our ranks, our communist analysis , and our fighting spirit, all to be carried back to the working class in local areas.
Organizing for a communist revolution is the only way we can defeat capitalism and its fascist, sexist, and racist system. Join PLP and the fight for communism.
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On the job report No safety net for workers under capitalism
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- 27 July 2018 169 hits
NEW YORK CITY, July 25—As I began my training for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) as a track worker, there has been a lot of safety talk at orientation and training. The indoctrination has begun, and the first order of business is making sure that workers know safety is our responsibility, and ours alone.
The topic came up about our fallen MTA brother St. Clair Richards-Stephens who was murdered by dangerous working condition in March 2018. He was a track worker who tripped, grabbed a handrail that broke, and fell to his death. The company and the union both stuck to their lame response to questions about his death: “Well we don’t know all the facts yet. This is why we say safety begins with you. But there’s still an ongoing investigation. What we can say is that he was a big guy.” They speak as if it were his fault that the wooden handrail didn’t support his weight, rather than emphasize the fact that wooden handrails have been proven unreliable!
During the “safety training”, the trainer informed us of lead paint in our work areas, wooden catwalks and handrails still in use. He described the many ways workers continue to get hurt by getting their fingers cut off, falling off elevated structures, or getting struck by trains. Yet, he claimed 90 percent of workers’ injuries are caused by our actions and the other 10 percent are from working conditions. Of those 10 percent, he claimed, “The only time when working conditions become unsafe is through acts of nature, like storms.”
At this point, I knew the instructor was full of it. He is paid to brainwash workers into believing injures are mainly caused by the workers and not the bosses that exploit them. I asked, “Couldn’t we improve upon the unsafe working areas to make them more safe?”
He said, “But we are designed to fail being victims of probability.” He began to use an exercise with numbers to prove his point, saying once you get used to something and it suddenly changes, you’re unable to adapt before your mistake is made.
A co-worker defended the instructor, “We will never be able to completely ensure everyone’s safety. Not even in a perfect world could we ensure everyone’s safety, that’s what he’s trying to say!”
I disagreed: “It is possible to ensure everyone’s safety! For example, getting a G.O. (general order) to shut down service on one track can prevent anyone from getting struck by a train, or we can get safety nets for those who work on elevated structures.”
The instructor initially agreed, then he again parroted his boss’s lie and said, “Safety is hard to control because humans are hard to fix.”
I realized this wasn’t an argument I could win. I approached my co-workers on break to ask them what they thought.
“I understand what he means but I’m too tired to really think about it,” one worker said. He’s onto something. That’s another trouble the MTA puts us through. The training was from 3-11pm. The day before, our schedule was 7am-3pm. A recent training required us to work from 10 pm-6 am. Our schedules are in constant fluctuation, making us tired and less able to think critically. This jeopardizes us workers and the riders who depend on us for transportation.
I persisted in my point about ensuring the workers’ safety. An individual may be flawed, but as a collective, we’re strong. In factories in other countries like Russia and China where the workers took state power in the last century, workers were able to dramatically reduce injuries because profit wasn’t the driving force of labor, necessity was. It’s capitalism that is at fault 100 percent of the time! After my rant, my coworkers agreed. “True, true,” one co-worker said.
It’s hard struggling against the bosses’ lies, especially when “the experts” present them. It’s a long fight, and we won’t win them all, but what’s important is that we drop the seeds for others to find and pick up. Stay patient, brothers and sisters, for the workers are always listening to what we say, and to what we don’t say. Stand tall! The fight continues.
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Thousands shut down highway for gun reform— To end violence, shut down capitalism
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- 27 July 2018 149 hits
CHICAGO, July 7—Today, 3,000 people shut down the main Chicago expressway, the Dan Ryan. They challenged the racist myth that Black and Latin youth responsible for high gun violence in their communities. It’s actually mass unemployment and school closings, symtoms of capitalist inequality, that lead to gun violence.
Chicago Strong, a youth group tied to a local Catholic Church, led the march. It was an inspiring day for communists in PLP. We were present with our mass organizations and we distributed hundreds of CHALLENGEs.
Many workers who marched understand some of the underlying reasons why violence exists in our neighborhoods. They also understand the extreme racist nature of capitalism. What is unclear is how to solve these problems. This march, orchestrated by the Chicago ruling class, pushed for reforms that workers have been losing for decades.
Reformists expose their tie to pols and the state
Chicago Strong demans’ include resources for our communities, national “common-sense gun laws,” jobs, and schools. Its march was endorsed by Chicago’s racist mayor, Rahm Emanuel. It is he who has led the charge to push ten of thousands of Black workers from Chicago. It is he who has shut down more than 50 schools and has attacked the Chicago Teachers’ Union. It is he who blocks police reform that tries to make his rabid racist beasts (aka Chicago Police Department) more accountable.
But these facts didn’t stop Reverend Michael Pfleger, the leader of the march, from linking arms with Eddie Johnson, chief of the racist, murderous CPD. Plenty of liberal politicians also posed for pictures. Sellout union leaders organized some of their members to march. There were many churches represented in the massive crowds; some came as far as 60 miles away. There were also students from Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in February. This spawned mass Democrat-led and mainly-white protests against gun violence.
Black and Latin youth feel the brunt of crisis
The liberal wing of the ruling class has attempted to turn the anti-gun violence protests into an attack on Black youth in Chicago. The main perpetrators of gun violence is still the police and the injustice system that protects them. Yet, the racist media focuses on gang violence.
In recent years the attacks on Black and Latin workers in Chicago has intensified. Mass unemployment and underemployment, and mass school closings accompanied with “War on Drugs” policies, have bred neighborhood violence. Youth unemployment for Black male workers ages 16 to 19 is over 80 percent, the group mostly impacted by gun violence here (Chicago Tribune 2018).
Another major factor of rising violence in neighborhoods stems from the city’s attack on education through mass school closings. Remaining schools are overcrowded and depleted of therapists and counselors.
The mayor and his capitalist cronies have no solutions for young Black and Latin workers. As they turn former public school buildings into luxury lofts, it is clear our class has become disposable. No jobs, no functioning schools, just more police as the city still pushes forward to build its cop academy. It is our job as communists to make the connections between gun violence in our communities to this capitalist system. Prayers and “friendly” politicians cannot fix a problem that capitalism is solely responsible for.
We cannot let any gun law reform be another way to target and terrorize Black and Latin working-class youth!
Capitalism in crisis headed for more fascism and war
This march represented the main wing of the ruling class trying to mobilize workers to support liberal capitalism. They want us to trust the Democratic Party to solve the very problems that they created. That’s why Pfleger, Jesse Jackson, and other misleaders fixate on worker-on-worker violence and embrace the racist CPD. We must shove these hypocrites out of the way. They will deliver us to the hands of the capitalist bosses who are hell bent on saving their tottering world empire on our backs.
They will try to discipline their class as well as us. One way or the other the rulers will need more soldiers to fight their enemies worldwide. Trump’s gutter racism is a hard sell to mobilize Black and Latin soldiers. The lack of jobs makes enlisting a virtual economic draft. Later, if need be, a real draft may be needed. This is the future: war and fascism.
Capitalism is incapable of being reformed or fixed. It will always need racist terror and violence to rule. Chicago Strong’s demands are a pipe dream meant to convince us that this deadly system has a future. But despite the misleadership present, this multiracial group of workers showed the working class’s potential to unite and shut this system down. Join the revolutionary communist party, PLP!
