June 19, or “Juneteenth,” commemorates the end of chattel slavery. Juneteenth has been pushed on the working class with the sponsorship of major banks like Wells Fargo. Juneteenth perpetuates many racist myths about the U.S., including the myth that the images we’re given of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama supposedly represent the ‘real’ U.S., and Donald Trump is something different.
While the bosses push their bank-sponsored holiday of Juneteenth on Black workers, the bosses obscure the many anti-racist battles that have been fought by Black and white workers together. These same bosses keep racism alive and well in the 21st century, to divide Black and white workers from eacher and to prepare the U.S. working class for bigger and deadlier wars on the horizon.
Origins of Juneteenth
Two years before June 19, 1865 came Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which excluded slave states that were not in rebellion against the Union – Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri – and Texas, which was not a battleground. Many planters and other slaveholders moved to Texas with over 150,000 slaves in order to escape the raging Civil War. In June, 1865, after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and the Union victory in New Orleans, word finally came to Galveston, Texas that the slaves were free. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending slavery throughout the country, was not passed until December, 1865.
Abraham Lincoln, the so-called “Great Emancipator” of slaves, was no believer in the equality of Black workers. His main motive for fighting the Civil War was preservation of the unity of the United States, not abolishing slavery. In 1858, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…”
Lincoln favored setting up colonies for Black former slaves in Africa and Central America, and requested funds from Congress to deport freed slaves.
Another history we do not learn about or celebrate is that of the multitude of rebellions against slavery, many of them multiracial, from the 1600s to the 1800s. In their book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker document many of these. Among them are:
- The Barbados rebellions in 1649, which united Irish and African slaves;
- Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, which united slaves and white indentured servants;
- The ‘New York City Conspiracy’ of 1741, which united African workers, white indentured servants, sailors, and Irish immigrants;
- Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831;
- John Brown’s multiracial antislavery campaign culminating at Harper’s Ferry.
- The most successful was the Haitian rebellion, which abolished slavery and colonization on that island by 1804.
Racism never ended
At the end of the Civil War, freed slaves became wage laborers on former plantations, sharecroppers, or domestic workers. For a short time, their well-being was protected by federal troops during Reconstruction from 1865-77. Once this protection was withdrawn, white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan flourished, often made up of local law enforcement. This Jim Crow era was characterized by the open murder of thousands of Black workers, rampant imprisonment, impoverishment and indebtedness of former slaves and total segregation.
Although many of these abuses were gradually mitigated through mass migrations of Black workers to the North through the end of World War II, court decisions, and then the Civil Rights Movement, racism has continued to flourish in the all parts of the U.S. Today, wage differentials between white men and Black and Latin workers add up to almost $800 billion dollars a year, nearly half of annual corporate profits. Differences in social spending on such services as education, health care and housing add up to hundreds of billions more dollars. U.S. capitalism could not survive without racism.
Black workers continue to be incarcerated at five times the rate of whites and be murdered disproportionately by police, accounting for 63 percent of those killed (223 deaths in 2017) while comprising 13 percent of the population. No cop has ever been convicted for murder of a Black worker in the U.S. Schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods are just as segregated today as they were 50 years ago.
All workers are hurt by racism
Other ideas pushed on workers today include “white privilege”, as if white workers created racism, benefit from it, or should be paralyzed or separate themselves because of guilt. While many white workers may temporarily hold racist views, anti-Black racism was purposely and methodically created by the U.S. bosses of the 1600-1700s to justify slavery and separate white indentured servants and poor farmers from Black slaves. Before that, there had been social mixing and intermarriage between whites and non-whites.
What the ruling class fears is us recognizing is that the lowered standards and super-exploitation for one sector of the working class brings down the standards for all sectors.
Racism serves capitalism well- to maximize profits and minimize rebellion. Separation into different schools, neighborhoods, job titles, unions, and neighborhoods keeps us divided when only multiracial mass action would enable us to fight back effectively. U.S. rulers also rely on racism to win workers, white, Black and immigrant, to fight imperialist wars for markets and resources by painting Muslim, Arab, Asian and other workers as enemies.
It is heartening to witness the mass uprising against the separation and incarceration of immigrant children, which has actually forced a minimal change in Trump’s policies. We must use this power of the unity of millions of workers to destroy this racist system once and for all and build an egalitarian worker-run society: communism.
President Donald Trump’s Group of 7 blunder in Quebec illustrates the disarray and decay plaguing U.S. imperialism. By refusing to sign the summit’s closing communiqué, and then blasting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “weak” and “dishonest” three days before he embraced North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump further alienated the closest U.S. allies. The week before, he’d assaulted the European Union, Canada, and Mexico with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.
According to the New York Times, the mouthpiece for the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, Trump “all but blew up the Group of 7 nations that the United States has led for more than four decades and essentially declared open political war on America’s closest neighbor” (6/10).
Pre-Trump, the U.S. and its most important allies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Japan) would collaborate on how to check their common imperialist foes, China and Russia. Trump has torpedoed this tradition and with it the “rules-based international order,” aka the “liberal world order”—the capitalist bosses’ code for the structure for U.S. imperialist dominance post-World War II. Tellingly, Trump asked for Russia to be let back in the G7, four years after they were kicked out for annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“America First”: a losing proposition
For the dominant finance capital wing, the likes of JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil, Trump’s undisciplined opportunism threatens their position atop the imperialist pecking order. Trump’s foreign policy and trade decisions are under attack by both Republican and Democratic politicians, the stooges who serve these bosses’ agenda. Pulling out of the Paris Climate accord, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, instigating a tariff war--each provocation, they complain, leaves the U.S. more isolated and less able to project its power. Meanwhile, U.S. bosses worry that Trump’s moves toward open racism and fascism will rip the mask of “democracy” from the murderous profit system—and undermine the bosses’ efforts to reinvigorate U.S. patriotism and enlist U.S. workers in the next global war.
Meanwhile, unhappy U.S. allies are left trying to prop up what’s left of the liberal world order, hoping for “a president who shares their values” after the 2020 elections (The Atlantic, 6/10). Or as Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main wing’s leading think tank, put it: “The United States has knocked itself off the pedestal” (Economist, 6/7).
Trump’s reckoning
In recent months, Trump has more openly defied the biggest bosses’ attempts to constrain him. He ousted former ExxonMobil CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Hoover Institute member and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, both reliable main-wing operatives. In their place, Trump appointed Mike Pompeo, once the favorite congressman of the Koch Brothers, and John Bolton, the loose cannon who has made a career out of sabotaging multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal.
The U.S. domestic-oriented wing (led by the Kochs, the Mercers, and Sheldon Adelson, among others) has no interest in investing in the massive military ground forces required to maintain a U.S.-dominated world order. As a result, they place less value on the international alliances that Trump is subverting.
But the main-wing bosses aren’t taking this lying down. The escalating Mueller investigation represents their effort to bring Trump to heel. In May 2016, Trump’s foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos told the Australian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Downer, that Russia had “derogatory information” about Hillary Clinton (Observer, 6/5). Papadopoulos turned out to be one of many incompetents in Trump’s camp who have opened the president to scrutiny, giving Mueller’s team an opening. Whether this opening leads to anything in the near future will hinge in part on whether the main-wing bosses are willing to risk a civil war with the president’s racist base.
Sooner or later, though, the main wing will seek to smash the domestic wing., Before they can impose fascism and a global war effort upon the working class, the main-wing bosses will need much greater discipline in their own ranks.
High stakes for all
The stakes for the U.S. ruling class are high. Their position as the world’s dominant imperialist is challenged more each day. In Africa, Chinese investment has exceeded the U.S. since 2009 (FT, 6/13/17). In South America, China is already the largest trading partner with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru (Atlantic, 2/3). The Chinese military buildup in the South China Sea continues unabated. Meanwhile, the ongoing nightmare for workers in Syria illustrates how Russia is outmaneuvering the U.S. in the Middle East.
As Foreign Affairs (4/30) noted:
The era of Pax Americana is over, but the next chapter of America’s role in the world is still being written. We are headed toward a new world order, and the United States should take a leadership role in shaping what that order will be. If it doesn’t, the outcome will be decided without it, its interests, and its values.
The stakes for the international working class are equally high. Whatever the outcome of this investigation, impeachment or the next election will hurt the working class. U.S. rulers will have conflicts internal and external, but they will always be in agreement about exploiting the working class and using their bodies to fight the next oil war. Working-class brothers and sisters must continue to look under the mask of capitalist “democracy.”
The deadliest mistake we can make would be to take sides in a fight among capitalist bosses. Robert Mueller and the FBI are the bosses’ professional contract killers, among the most lethal and racist enemies of the working class. Cheering for the impeachment of Trump equates to siding with a segment of the ruling class that is even more ready, willing, and able to unleash war and fascism on the world. We are told that Trump is destroying “democracy.” But for workers, capitalist electoral democracy has always been a dangerous myth, a cloak thrown over the capitalists’ brutal class dictatorship. It’s not just Trump, it’s capitalism! No president can ever serve workers’ interests. Only a communist revolution, led by Progressive Labor Party, can create the world we need.
CHICAGO, June 12—The racist Chicago Police Department (CPD) took the life of another member of our class. On the night of June 6, a killer cop shot 24-year-old Black father Maurice Granton Jr. in the back, killing him after a chase in the city’s south side Bronzeville neighborhood.
This blatant murder again demonstrates the role of the racist police under capitalism. Workers and community members have protested throughout the area since Maurice’s murder. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have joined them in their struggles and put forward communist revolution as the only solution to end these racist police murders once and for all!
Workers, kkkops square off in neighborhood, hospital
Immediately after Maurice was murdered, workers responded angrily in the neighborhood. They confronted the police who tried to keep order. People were gathered on all four corners of the intersection. They shouted questions at the racist cops, asking them where Maurice’s wounds were and how they could justify such a shooting. The cops responded by brutalizing people in the crowd, including harassing a 10-year-old boy who had dropped a phone and then using a taser on a woman who was trying to help Maurice after he was shot. Others were taken into custody.
At the University of Chicago Hospital, where Maurice was fighting for his life, racist hospital officials tried to usher his family out of the emergency room waiting area. The family was not having it, and in the end, CPD and University cops threw his family out. Then, more than a dozen armed cops formed a line in front of the entrance and said the area was on lockdown.
Only ruthless capitalism would be so cold as to gun down a worker, then proceed to block off his loved ones from seeing him as he died. This whole racist system needs to be destroyed!
Remember Maurice, call out the bosses
The next day, tensions were still high. PL’ers joined an angry young worker who was encouraging fight back. We knew this area well since we have had a CHALLENGE sale here regularly for several years and it was on this year’s May Day march route. We got out CHALLENGE, met more neighbors and Maurice’s sister, Joanna.
That same evening, Maurice’s family held a vigil where he had been shot. Maurice leaves behind two young girls who he loved and lived for. His sister said he was very funny and just wanted to have a family since he didn’t have one growing up. In all, there were about 75 people there to show their anger for his racist murder.
Different speakers at the vigil called for release of the body-cam footage, a new mayor, to put pressure on Kim Foxx (the Cook County State’s Attorney), and to “fix” the broken racist CPD. They pointed out how young Black and Latin people are being criminalized and targeted for murder, while the police act with impunity.
We distributed more CHALLENGEs at the vigil, as well as a flyer exposing capitalism as the real culprit in this murder. It was pointed out that it did not matter that the cop who shot Maurice was a Black cop. This is true. In the end, they are all racist terrorists, doing the bidding of their capitalist masters who run society for their profits and power. Switching up a few politicians or getting more Black cops hired will never significantly change a system that needs racist and sexist state terror in order to exist.
Fight the bosses’ racist attacks
Racist capitalism had failed Maurice, just as countless others, from a very young age. He lived in foster homes growing up. Maurice attended Dyett High School, which had been gutted of resources for years and almost closed in 2015, had it not been for the community who organized a 19-day hunger strike which forced Chicago Public Schools to keep the school open. He was forced to live in an area with no jobs. And now, the racist system’s cops finish him off by shooting him in the back.
The bosses have been clearly worried about this shooting. They used their racist media to make Maurice look bad, including releasing a video that supposedly shows him holding a weapon, as well as sharing his Facebook pages in an attempt to justify their racist murder.
Various working-class neighborhoods in Chicago are gentrifying rapidly. Since 2000, over 300,000 Black workers and their families have been driven out of Chicago. The bosses are using their “war on crime and violence” as a way to move workers out of the way by evicting them out of their homes and terrorizing them.
Bronzeville could be potentially very valuable for the real estate bosses. It is close to downtown, has two train stations, two nearby highways and new multi-million-dollar bike/pedestrian bridges leading to the revamped lakefront with new bike lanes and improved beaches.
However, people in this neighborhood that we’ve talked to understand all these plans and want to fight. Many have expressed interest in demonstrating at the police station where this killer cop works. Others want to go to City Hall and hold a march. All great ideas that our Party will continue to help organize, lead, and participate in.
PLP will keep up the struggle alongside our class sisters and brothers in any mass movements that we find ourselves. It’s essential to win more workers and students to the necessity of destroying this system of capitalism that is responsible for the widespread violence our class suffers daily. Our goal remains to wipe out these racist cops, bosses, and capitalism in Chicago and everywhere through communist revolution, and build in its place a worker-led society that meets our needs.
BROOKLYN, June 7—Students, staff and faculty have been gaining plenty of experience in class struggle at Kingsborough Community College (KCC) this semester. With the leadership of a new student in the Progressive Labor Party and friends, our multiracial sanctuary committee has shifted gears from defending our working-class friends against racist attacks like those on our fellow cafeteria workers, to going on the offensive against an openly racist administrator.
‘No to racism, no to Goldstein’
Not long after May Day, it came to the attention of the students and faculty that KCC’s “Director of Communications and Public Relations,” Michael Goldstein, the public face of the college, was posting openly racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim statements on social media.
When some antiracist faculty obtained several screenshots, they turned them over to the larger group of students and faculty. Goldstein’s racism gave way to anger and determination to fight back. This was especially true for women and Muslim students, many from Yemen, which is suffering from intense U.S.-Saudi imperialist attacks. We decided that a leaflet must be written calling for Goldstein’s termination.
In less than a week, a leaflet was collectively discussed and produced involving two dozen students. Immigrant women and PL’ers have taken a lead role in distributing the leaflets and, as CHALLENGE goes to press, over 1,000 have been distributed around campus, just in time for final exams. About 20 percent of KCC’s roughly 10,000 students are Muslim, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
There has been no official response from the administration, but the antiracists and PL’ers at KCC have continued meeting, sharing CHALLENGE, and discussing plans to escalate the struggle further. KCC is the only community college in Brooklyn. Since the summer semesters are as busy as the rest of the academic year, the racists are put on notice: get ready for a long, hot summer!
A single spark
The struggle against racist Goldstein directly follows the demonstration and march (CHALLENGE, 4/18) on the KCC President’s office in defense of the cafeteria workers’ jobs. Many students approached groups like the pro-immigrant KCC Sanctuary Committee to find out how to become more involved.
Thanks to regular distributions of CHALLENGE outside of the campus gates and PLP support of local struggles, this May Day also saw recruitment and new friendships among the students to PLP. Through study groups on topics like reform and revolution, PL’s student work began sharpening at the time that some students became interested in fighting back.
PLP fights for a communist ‘paradise’ on earth
The fightbacks of this past semester have presented serious struggles in gaining confidence in the working class. Many students and cafeteria workers, like masses of workers around the world, are depressed, cynical, and hopeless. Many are won over to different forms of individualism and escapism.
Some believe in Islam’s promise of a paradise after death. There are open communist atheists (and a pro-communist Christian) side-by-side with them in struggle who also break fasts and break bread together during this month of Ramadan. Together, they provide a glimpse that a communist “paradise on earth” is worth fighting for. Unlike a religious paradise, there will be many problems and struggles under communism, all to be solved in the interest of and by the world’s working class.
It’s revealing, this idea of communism—this simple idea that workers should run the world, without any racist borders. It’s an idea and optimism that capitalism can never kill. Recently, a PL’er was discussing politics with a new Muslim friend, unsure of how she would respond to CHALLENGE. When the PL’er opened the conversation talking about how Muslims and communists have a long history of fighting side by side, she responded “Yeah! Like in the Soviet Union.”
As the discussion continued, the young Muslim woman showed a clear understanding of how racism and imperialism functioned around the world. The PL’er asked how she knew all this. “Oh, these people have been giving out CHALLENGE newspaper in front of campus for awhile, I try to read each one and sometimes it has articles about history and politics. It’s an interesting paper.”
The “Dark Night” of imperialist war and devastation will have its end, in part, because this young woman, an antiracist fighter, is one of several more who are open to struggle, and are becoming nails in capitalism’s coffin. The struggle continues.
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Teachers strike against education reform law, again!
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- 15 June 2018 144 hits
MEXICO, JUNE 4—The teachers went on strike! Again! They were joined by rebellious teachers from Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and other states throughout Mexicao. Again! They organized encampments in Oaxaca City and in Mexico City. Again! The capitalist state apparatus and media attacked them. Again!
The battle for small victories for the working class is neverending. Only workers power through communist revolution can finally end capitalist exploitation.
The PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) government led by Alejandro Murat in Oaxaca and President Enrique Pedro Nieto thought they had Section 22 (Oaxaca Teacher’s Union) locked down in such a way that we wouldn’t be able to rise up and fight back. The whole capitalist state apparatus was employed from June 2013 untill now to impose the labor attacks disguised as educational reforms. In fact, these “reforms” are about privatizing education, cutbacks in educational funding, and firing teachers through punitive testing. They are also an attack on the teacher unions, especially the rebellious CNTE (National Coordinator of Educational Workers) and its’ Oaxaca local, Section 22. This militant Oaxaca local is also demanding more teacher jobs and the freeing of all political prisoners.
Part of the teacher’s strike action involves keeping a large encampment in the center of Oaxaca City while at the same time carrying out various actions in strategic locations. Thousands of teachers blocked access to Oaxaca’s international airport, breaking the stranglehold of the state government and forcing them to the negotiation table to deal with the demands of the Section 22 leadership. After the government’s response, the striking workers will determine how the struggle should proceed.
Today, the struggle widened to other groups, as it is being joined by the national CNTE. Nationwide 200,000 teachers are expected to participate, as well as 10,000 in Mexico City, to get rid of the educational reforms by taking advantage of the coming elections when the capitalists compete for political power. This struggle holds great importance at a time when the national capitalists and imperialists confront each other.
During the enormous march led by the CNTE on June 4th in Mexico City, PLP members and friends leafleted to show support for the teachers and called on them to organize in the communist Progressive Labor Party and reject the electoral farce. In Oaxaca meanwhile, dozens of militant teachers who have been influenced by PLP’s communist ideas have remained active and are providing leadership to the protests. The false promises of the presidential candidates have not placated the militancy of the teachers. We have known through decades of experience that only through organizing and struggle can we defend ourselves against the shocks created by capitalism. Our challenge is to advance upon this understanding toward revolutionary consciousness and actions that will overthrow the system of capitalist oppression and replace it with a society of communist equality.
