History has segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
Below is part I of a series aimed at reuniting the history of communism with antiracism. Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, excerpted throughout this piece, is a good supplement for those who would like to find out more.

In the years after slavery, Southern U.S. bosses used racist terror in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, police beatings, and lynching, legal and extralegal, to keep Black workers oppressed and as a source of cheap labor to drive down the wages of all workers Black and white.
Robin D.G. Kelley in Hammer and Hoe described it as the following:

White supremacist groups [including the KKK] organized by some of [Birmingham’s] leading citizens…enjoyed huge numerical and financial support…Klansmen [through intimidation and violence] sought to cleanse their city of Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, and recalcitrant African-Americans who refused to accept “their place” in the hierarchy of race

The Southern bosses police and kangaroo courts (sham legal proceedings) were the heart of this injustice system.

Fear [of the Southern injustice system] came from the knowledge that the color of your skin made you a suspect—a suspect that looked just like the prime suspect—every time the police were looking for a black man. (WNYC 2/1/2013)

When workers united and fought back against this terror, the bosses often used racism and anti-communism to try to divide the working class.
The Scottsboro Boys
On March 25, 1931 nine Black teenagers age 13 to 19 were pulled from a freight car near Paint Rock, Alabama and charged with raping two white women. Within three days, the young men were tried by an all-white jury, convicted and sentenced to death. A lynch mob gathered at the jail in Scottsboro, demanding the young men be turned over to the racist rioters.
Courthouse lynchings like this were common for Black workers and youth living in the Jim Crow south. So common in fact that the local branch of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the other civic organizations, focused on helping small business owners, didn’t even respond to the case.
Communists, First Responders
One organization did respond, the International Labor Defense (ILD), a workers’ defense organization initiated by the Communist Party. ILD was made up of communist and non-communist workers, Black and white. Within days of the sham trial, the ILD set up a defense committee, obtained lawyers for the nine young men on death row and built the defense of the Scottsboro Boys into a worldwide cause that saved them from the electric chair and after a many years-long battle eventually won their freedom.
The fight to defend the Scottsboro Boys involved several thousands of people around the world. The ILD organized mass meetings where family members of the wrongly convicted young men would speak alongside members of the ILD.
Bosses Counter with Terror
The Southern bosses were terrified of this multiracial movement against lynchings and responded with a campaign of terror against Black and white supporters of the campaign. Along with the physical terror carried out by the Klan, a campaign of anti-communism was launched to scare workers away from the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys.
The anticommunist campaign took several forms. The kkkops arrested people, and beat people suspected of being supporters of the ILD. Black and white women were arrested and threatened with rape by the police. The bosses’ press spread anti-communism.

The Birmingham Labor Advocate warned its readers to beware of outside agitators who, “under the cover of darkness,” disseminated ”Red literature preaching free love [and] inter marriage. (Hammer and Hoe)

The local NAACP was reluctant to help defend the working-class youth. But a whole year after the arrests, one of the women accusers of rape came forward and admitted there was no rape and that the police had forced her into lying. This created an upsurge in anger about the case and the NAACP finally joined the ILD in the campaign to free the young men.
In spite of the beatings, jailings and threats, the ILD kept both the mass campaign and the legal fight going by organizing meetings, rallies and raising money to pay legal fees and other expenses for the families of the Scottsboro Boys.

The All-Southern Scottsboro and Civil Rights Conference was one such mass meeting that went on in spite of Klan and police intimidation. In the days prior to the conference Klansmen organized a twenty-car motorcade through the Black community and distributed leaflets that read “Communism Will Not Be Tolerated.”
 Nonetheless some three hundred Blacks and fifty whites packed the meeting room and between 500 and 1000 were turned away because of lack of space and by the military presence of the police who stationed eighty cops equipped with three machine guns in posts across the street from the hall.
…As Hosea Hudson [a Black communist and labour leader in Deep South] recalled many stood up to the intimidation.  “[People] just walked all under them rifles, just went on in the door and on to the meeting.” (Hammer and Hoe)

The fight to free the railroaded young men took many years. Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences; all were free by 1946.
You Cannot Kill the Working Class
Angelo Herndon, a Black communist labour organizer, summed up the significance of the struggle in his essay entitled “You Cannot Kill the Working Class.”

If you know the South as I do, you know what the Scottsboro case means. Here were the landlords in their fine plantation homes, and the big white bosses in their city mansions, and the whole brutal force of [private security] and police who do their bidding. There they sat, smug and self-satisfied, and oh, so sure that nothing could ever interfere with them and their ways. For all time they would be able to sweat and cheat the [Black] people, and jail and frame and lynch and shoot them, as they pleased.
And all of a sudden someone laid a hand on their arm and said: “STOP.” It was a great big’ hand, a powerful hand, the hand of the workers. The bosses were shocked and horrified and scared. I know that. And I know also that after the fight began for the Scottsboro boys, every [Black] worker in mill or mine, every [Black] cropper on the Black Belt plantations, breathed a little easier and held his head a little higher.

HAITI, May 1—On May Day in Haiti, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continued to denounce capitalism while raising the consciousness of the masses about the conditions of workers and the atrocious exploitation and domination by the bosses. In one small city, comrades organized a day of activities, including a conference-debate during which we presented the history of May Day and the situation of the working class in this region; a dinner and cultural evening of militant song and poetry. Other comrades participated in a mass march of workers in the capital city, Port-au-Prince.
Prior to May Day, comrades had invited a local labor leader to participate in a regular weekly local radio show that they host, to speak about the May Day march. Our comrades put the emphasis on class struggle, ending capitalism and fighting for a just, worker-led egalitarian society—communism.
Every day our Party is creating confidence in the masses. More and more, those close to us are becoming class conscious and coming closer to the struggle that we fight for. In order to organize our May Day activities in the town, we relied on local and international comrades for financial support. Workers and students living abroad and in Haiti contributed what they could to make the day a success. Despite the threat of rain (there had been serious flooding in this town for the week prior to May Day), close to 100 people participated enthusiastically in the day’s activities, which lasted seven hours.
The speakers denounced the attempts of the ruling class to expropriate May Day from the workers. The bosses try to make the day one of mindless festivity, food and fairs. They call it the Day of Agriculture and Work, but several speakers noted what a lie that was, since Haiti has neither prospering agriculture—there is instead systematic deforestation and total lack of support for small farmers and farm-workers—nor work—the Haitian working class faces an unemployment rate of 83 percent, with most people involved in the below-subsistence level informal sector and the 7 percent employed in the private sector rarely earning the $5/day minimum wage (the remaining 11 percent are in government jobs).
Despite a mass struggle since 2009 for an increase in the daily minimum wage—now $5/day—workers have been suffering. Despite election box approval, the bosses, the State and the Council on Salary have continued to lie and deceive. Horrible, crushing inflation has not changed the rulers’ minds; to the contrary, there have been firings in the factories for those who dare to complain. And that’s only among the formally employed: for homemakers, market sellers, drivers, cultivators and sharecroppers, things are maybe even worse. For teachers and office workers, the situation is also precarious, especially given the devaluation of the Haitian gourde (prior to the 2010 earthquake, there were 40 gourdes to the U.S. dollar; today it’s 68.5). A high school teacher working 6 hours a day earns less than $160 (all wages cited in $US)/month (and often is owed at least 6 months wages); a bank cashier earns about $245/month; women house servants earn between $28–$80/month. So-called “free workers,” that is, those without a fixed job in the informal economy can earn $3–5/day; a mason can earn $7.8–$11.70 for a day’s labor. These workers have no benefits, unemployment nor health insurance and can be fired at will by the bosses.
Other speakers stated emphatically that this was all really just another form of slavery. Many examples were given, including newspaper reports that in some U.S.-owned businesses, workers face such intense speed-up that they have to wear diapers because the bosses don’t allow them time to take care of their needs; there are factories in the free trade zones that don’t give workers enough time to have a meal during the work day. It is clear that the capitalist system tries to dehumanize workers, who create all value and profits for the bosses. “We can’t accept these conditions!” several workers exclaimed. “We have to fight back against them and the bosses who profit!”
One leader of a local women’s group, with whom we have been working since our forum for International Working Women’s Day last March 8, noted that women must take part in the class struggle of the working class. Several participants made clear that they understood that the working class is exploited and dominated everywhere in the world and that workers must get together to fight for their liberation.
In order to end once and for all the system of exploitation and domination that is capitalism, PLP raises class awareness in several countries at the present time. We are growing, despite the problems that workers face in this dark night. It shall have its end. PLP comrades are respected and they have the confidence of many workers. Workers everywhere, join us for communist revolution.

MEXICO CITY, MAY 1—A group of 45 comrades, sympathizers, and friends of Progressive Labor Party carried the red flags of communism in the May 1st march in Mexico City. Our revolutionary slogans and chants were heard by thousands of workers. We distributed 1,500 pamphlets of Challenge. In Oaxaca, another group of 12 comrades distributed 3,000 pamphlets in the march organized by the Teacher’s Union Local Section 22.
History has taught us that workers can only confront imperialist war if we fight to get rid of the capitalist system that creates crisis, war, and fascism. That teaching is the heritage that the Russian and Chinese workers left us when they took power during WWI and WWII, respectively. We shouldn’t forget that in order to put an end to both wars, it was essential that workers took power into their own hands.
The recent attacks by the United States on Syria and Afghanistan, much like the mobilization of aircraft carriers to the Korean Peninsula, is a signal of war against the imperialists of Russia and China, their true targets. It’s a sign that the bosses are, with each action, closer to initiating a third world war, in which they will use both conventional and nuclear weapons and spill the blood of millions of workers, all for the sake of their profits. Under this reality, capitalism confirms its devastating and criminal essence.
Within the shadow of imperialist war, the ruling class of Mexico can only offer an electoral circus with increasing fascism. Workers must be very clear that bourgeois “democracy” is a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class—a dictatorship of a few privileged parasites who exploit that great majority of impoverished workers.
Electoral democracy is a fraud. This sham tries to trick the working class into thinking they have the “freedom” to choose their rulers, but the reality is that it only serves to legitimize the new oppressors and exploiters. In no place or moment in history has the working class achieved its liberation by means of elections. The working class can  only liberate itself when it organizes itself into a revolutionary party to take power through force and establish a dictatorship of the working class.
In the electoral process, the only ones who can participate are those who have millions in resources at their disposal and are willing to represent those who finance them. During their term they have to work to comply with their commitments to those who carried them into power.
All of the electoral parties represent the interests of some faction of the capitalist class, allied or subordinate to imperialist interests, principally those of the US. No electoral party actually represents the workers. The working class needs its own party to achieve a change from the capitalist economic, political and social system – a transformation that cannot be achieved through the electoral path, as that is a process completely controlled by the capitalist class.
When the capitalist “democracy” fails, the bosses turn to fascism, the most violent form of their judicial, police, and military apparatus that invokes the spread of fear among an upsurge of intense violence. To achieve this climate of fear, it is necessary for the country to usher in repressive state institutions before the presence of some supposed enemy that intends to “destabilize peace.”
In Mexico, the supposed democracy has achieved alarming rates of robbery and murder, the deviant millionaires and the abuses of power of the governor of Veracruz through the orders of Felipe Calderon of PAN and of Enrique Peña Nieto of PRI, the killings in Ayotzinapa that they carried out, under the direction of Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD). PRD is the leader of Morena (another electoral party) and represents a nationalist sector whose win will only benefit a small group and not the mass of followers that they have succeeded in convincing. None of them represents the interests of the working class.
Drug trafficking, corruption, murder, and disappearances of journalists and fighers, the increase in poverty rates, the sexism that women suffer every day, the enrichment of a select few – all go hand in hand with the “democratic process” created by the capitalist system, the same system that has to be stopped, through the process of understanding its inner working and how to best fight it.
During election season all candidates are
labeled corrupt rats, but no one blames the capitalist system for the tragedies that the working class has to live through day to day in order for the bosses to gain more and more profit. No political platform or candidate in any election attacks the profit system of the bourgeois class. They only put ridiculous names to insufficient programs that are designed to gather votes.
The ex-mayor of Huixquilucan del Mazo Maza (the region with the most drug traffickers) represented the private sector of Banco Azteca and Grupo Servin. He has family connections with different politicians of Grupo Altacomulco, to which President Peña Nieto belongs. Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) politician Vásquez Mota is involved in allegations for his foundation Juntos Podemos (Together We Can), which has received more than $1 billion pesos (Proceso, 5/18). Although Morena candidate Delfina Gómez isn’t known for corruption in her past, her party’s connection with billionaire Carlos Slim and bosses’ union Coparmex leaves many questions to be answered (El Financiero, 5/22).
We can’t ignore the massive business of these elections. For example, according to official electoral sources, there is at least $394 million pesos that will be spent on this election (El Financiero, 5/22), and the 2017 budget for all the political parties combined is over $4 billion pesos (Excelsior, 2/15). These figures may not even be an accurate estimate, as the different ruling class parties sponsor various other activities and buy votes. It’s always necessary to consider the fact that all electoral parties spend exaggerated sums to promote themselves; to follow the money shows who really benefits.
What’s at Stake?
What drives the desire to win the electoral dispute in one of the most important states on a national level? It’s not the high poverty levels or the alarming rates of sexist violence. It’s the control of one of the most important industrial zones in the country at a key geostrategic point, with one side close to a metropolis that guarantees a cheap work force and the other side in the middle of the country’s most important commercial routes. If this were not enough, it’s also a migrant route for an exploited semi-slave workforce. We find ourselves in an upsurge of capitalist crisis, which will not hesitate to expose its fascist face and exalt the poisons of nationalism, individualism, and sexism, making it harder for workers to fight together against the international ruling class.
The bosses want to make us believe that nothing can be done to change the oppressive and exploitative system that is capitalism, but the Russian and Chinese workers showed that it is possible to wrench power from the capitalists and build a new society, led by the working class. Despite the dark night that offers imperialist war and fascism, the workers, with dedication and organization, will forge a communist future.

Lynchburg, Virginia, May 13—On May Day 2017, a young man from Lynchburg declared to the May Day marchers in Brooklyn, NY that Liberty University (LU), founded and led by the racist and conservatively religious Falwell family, would not be a “safe space” for President Donald Trump to give a commencement speech.
He was not just whistling Dixie! Over 200 protestors marched and chanted along Ward Road across from LU for four hours, condemning the president and the ruling class for their racist policies. “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” rang out as friends and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) from Maryland and Lynchburg joined others in the Seven Hills Progressive Society (SHPS) to challenge the racist U.S. president in a spirited rally.
Protestors carried signs condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy health care and education for the working class and to promote racism against immigrants. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party leadership in Lynchburg criticized the protest as a provocation that would end up helping the local Republicans. They pathetically called instead for a day of service to plant flowers in the city—their idea of “resistance”.
Which Way Forward?
Within SHPS there are different ideas about how to fight back. Several signs called for impeachment of Trump and attacked his connections to Russia. Chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” was the most enthusiastic one. While Trump is a lightning rod for our anger, such chants do not expose the power, racism, war, and casual brutality of the capitalist class. Debating “Pence vs Trump” or even “Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren/Kamala Harris/Joe Biden vs Trump” will not lead us to the revolution against capitalism that we need. One PLP member said that the choice of a “competent fascist” versus “an incompetent fascist” was not what we were about. This point led to a much better discussion about capitalism and the way it generates racism and oppression. These analyses will have to intensify among SHPS members and their base. Similarly, the strategic emphasis on antiracism and multiracial unity must be strengthened.
Boldness Will Win  
LU and its students make up 20 percent of the population of Lynchburg and provide many area jobs directly and indirectly. It is the center of the Liberty Council which brings lawsuits attacking LGBTQ rights and promotes Christianity in government. Many of the protestors had signs calling for “building a wall” between church and state and threw religious teachings back at Trump and the University for policies that attack the working class. One sign said “Jesus was a Refugee”. One student skipped her graduation ceremony to protest the sexism of Trump and LU with a sign “Girlcotting my commencement”, a play on the more common word, “boycott.”
The PLP congratulates the SHPS for organizing this bold action, recognizing that, given the prominence of LU in the city and the rank intimidation carried out by Trumpists across the country, fears about job and personal security was real. But many of the protestors overcame such concerns and joined the rally.
Two young restaurant workers joined the rally after being told about it by a coworker—who had voted for Trump! Another woman came despite working with a LU contractor who is friends with Falwell.
Three racists arrived midway into our protest with a large flag supporting white supremacy and Trump.  Members of PLP and SHPS confronted the racists and separated them from the group while chanting for 20 minutes. The racist flag bearer tried to parade in front of our line, but our forces kept pace and chanted at him the whole time, driving the racists about half a block away from the rest of the rally. The racist also offered a Pepsi to the protestors, mocking the rally and invoking memory of the racist Pepsi commercia. Our leadership showed that we cannot just ignore these racists. Confronting them as we did today, and eventually stopping them physically, will be necessary since Trump’s racist goons are supported by the police and courts.
Boldness and solidarity can defeat fear, and the working class can defeat the fascists as more of its members learn the lessons of the world communist movement. Plant revolutionary ideas among the workers, not flowers in the gardens of the bosses.