The U.S. presidential election is taking racism, and racist attacks against the international working class, to new heights. As Black workers are being killed by the police on a daily basis, Clinton and Trump have continually fueled the racism behind these murders.
Capitalism has always used racism to divide the working class—from enforcing segregation between Black slaves and white indentured servants to developing pseudoscientific theories about racial superiority. Racism has taken different forms among different groups of capitalists around the world depending on their needs, but few bosses have matched the genocidal brutality of the U.S. ruling class, within U.S. borders and through imperialist wars around the world.
In this context, the U.S. presidential election is really about which candidate, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, stands to inherit that legacy. The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party aspires to inherit a different legacy – a legacy of international working class unity against racism, sexism and imperialism. PLP fights for armed revolution for the working class to take state power, and smash the capitalist class, and their racist politician representatives.
Trump: Representative of Open Racism
Trump’s long history of racist attacks are first documented in 1973, when he was singled out in a court case for systematically denying apartments to Black people applying to live in his buildings. As the 2016 Republican nominee, Trump is making open racism the binding theme of his campaign by attacking Middle Eastern workers, Black workers and immigrant workers in the U.S. for the problems of capitalism that white workers are increasingly experiencing. He has encouraged his supporters to attack Black protesters at his rallies, and has accepted support from a host of openly racist Klansmen. Trump also brags regularly about his endorsements from most of the U.S.’ police unions.
While Trump has millions of supporters, millions of multiracial workers and students know Trump’s history and militantly oppose his open racism. More dangerously for the working class, however, is the long history of Hillary Clinton’s racist attacks. While Trump has played to openly racist workers, Clinton has spent her career leading racist attacks against the working class that have destroyed millions of families with a liberal, pro-worker mask.
Clinton: The Grooming of a Professional Racist
There’s a predictable upsurge in racism during every U.S. presidential election, at the least. The bosses’ politicians and media foment this racism to divert the working class from uniting against capitalism. Racist cops, mass incarceration, blaming Black workers for capitalist-caused poverty, and using racism and nationalism to convince workers around the world to fight each other in imperialist wars while the capitalists reap the profits, are how politicians earn their value in the eyes of the ruling class donors. In the eyes of many U.S. bosses, Clinton has earned her value as a professional racist, whose capabilities of maintaining racist working class divisions while stoking nationalist, pro-U.S. imperialist unity are second only to Barack Obama. Her history shows us how.
Clinton frequently champions her working class upbringing in an openly anti-Semitic household. She was a teenager in the 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights movement. While hundreds of thousands of young people marched against segregation, Clinton volunteered for Republican Barry Goldwater’s openly racist 1964 Presidential campaign.
While many workers have had racist upbringings that they later reject through struggle, Clinton’s early racism laid the basis for bigger attacks against the working class as a high-achieving and promising tool of the U.S. capitalists. While in Arkansas she supported her husband, Bill, then Governor, who signed a law supporting the Arkansas State Flag’s celebration of the Confederacy, the short-lived nation during the slaveholder’s rebellion during the 1800s.
While her husband was Governor, Clinton took a position on the board of Walmart, while they launched a campaign that built racism and nationalism to sell American-made products, called “Buy American.” This campaign to “Buy American” happened while Walmart hypocritically exploited slave labor wages in Asia (PBS, 11/16/04).
“Wal-Mart continued to get most of its products from overseas during its buy America program including from this factory in Bangladesh that used 11 and 12-year-old girls. (Good Morning America 1/31/2008).
The Clintons Get Promoted
The Clintons ultimately proved their worth to the ruling class as racist killers during the 1992 presidential election, when Bill Clinton was down in the polls: “Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired Black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him for later. After the execution, Clinton remarked, ‘[N]o one can say I’m soft on crime.’” (The Nation 2/10/16)
Bill Clinton won, and this racist execution foreshadowed the hiring of 100,000 more police officers nationwide, and his racist destruction of welfare (see below). Internationally, millions of workers in Mexico were driven off their lands by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as U.S. bombs rained down on the former Yugoslavia. Throughout the 1990s, when the U.S. wasn’t routinely bombing workers in Iraq, workers there faced sanctions at the cost of over 500,000 children’s lives. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, later said this was “worth it.”
Hillary Follows Bill, Obama’s Footsteps
In 1994, Hillary Clinton campaigned for Bill Clinton’s Federal Crime that wreaked havoc on the working class calling it a “smart, tough” bill that will “make a difference in police officers lives.” (White House Press Secretary, 8/10/1994). She followed that up in 1996 describing Black children as “super-predators” as openly racist a statement as anything Trump has uttered and a justification for the devastation caused by the new laws.
Hillary Clinton’s racist statements in 1996 describing Black children as “super-predators” are as openly racist as anything Trump has uttered, and had dire consequences. Among other crimes of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Hillary Clintons’ overt racism dovetailed with the skyrocketing numbers of incarcerated Black youth during the 1990s that, combined with the other attacks, wreaked havoc on the working class.
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history….he escalated [The War on Crime] beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible.. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level in 1983 (The Nation 2/10/16).
Hillary Clinton then led the charge to drive the poorest section of the working class into abject poverty by supporting her husband’s dismantling of welfare benefits, an attack that was another hugely disproportionate attack on Black workers, this time targeting single mothers and children. She bragged about her role in the onslaught, and of her service to ruling class, in the face of opposition. “I agreed that he should sign it and [I]worked hard to round up votes for its passage—though he and the legislation were roundly criticized by some liberals, advocacy groups for immigrants and most people who worked with the welfare system,” (Hillary Clinton, Living History, 2003). The result of Hillary Clinton’s efforts were that “By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps.” (The Nation, 2/10/20016)
The New York Times is one example of the leading ruling class mouthpieces praising their servant Clinton’s phony “record of service to children, women and families” (NYT Editorial, 9/25/16). Hypocritically, the exploitation of child workers in Bangladesh mentioned above is just one example of Hillary Clinton’s racist attacks on the very children she claims to champion. As Secretary of State in the Obama administration, she led the effort to start the civil wars in Libya and Syria that have shattered millions of lives, especially children, women, and families, and left the Middle East in flames. The Clinton State Department-backed militia in Libya is murdering Black workers on a mass scale. “ Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, said there was violence throughout the uprising against black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans in the capital, “It really is racist violence against all dark-skinned people,” Bouckaert said. “This situation for Africans in Tripoli is dire.”
It’s Not Clinton or Trump—It’s Capitalism
As the U.S. bosses’ imperialist rivalry sharpens with Russian and Chinese imperialism from the devastation in Syria to the South China Sea, the threat of increased racist, sexist, and imperialist assault on the international working class increase every day. Clinton and Trump’s racist campaigns to keep the working class divided mean the working class will lose no matter who wins the election. Clinton may very well defeat Trump, but this is no victory of the “lesser evil.”
For the international working class, Clinton’s services to the ruling class and crimes against the working class, of which this is a partial list, would just be getting started—on a bigger scale. But the bosses have a problem. Millions of workers around the world were inspired by the Black youth and workers rebelling in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Baton Rouge, and now Charlotte.
These rebellions against racist police terror took aim at the very capitalist system responsible for racist mass incarceration and unemployment. On the other hand, the U.S. bosses know that to keep their sagging, but heavily-armed empire, they must win masses of U.S. workers, especially Black workers and immigrants, to sacrifice for U.S. imperialism, and fight in imperialist wars against their class sisters and brothers of other bosses’ countries.
PLP salutes the rebellious Black workers and youth who dare to fight back. PLP is organizing a mass movement in more than two dozen countries to spread the many flames of rebellion into a fire to burn capitalism to the ground once and for all. It is time to smash all the bosses, their politicians, and the racist system they represent, with communist revolution.
BROOKLYN, September 24—Once again workers have turned up the level of class struggle in response to racist police murder. In Charlotte and Tulsa and in cities across the U.S., workers are fighting back against the latest racist murders by the bosses’ police and gaining confidence that the working class can unite and take on the ruling class.
In Tulsa, hundred of workers and students marched on Police Headquarters forcing the Tulsa bosses to indict killer cop Betty Shelby who murdered Terence Crutcher. In Charlotte NC, thousands of Black, white, Latin and Asian workers rebelled against the bosses after the murder of Keith Lamont Scott.
Workers in Charlotte defied the bosses police and National Guard, shutting down the business center where brave workers have taken the streets night after night in the face of tear gas and rubber bullets used against them, even after one of the protestors was killed, likely by one of those rubber bullets. As the Charlotte ruling class declared a State of Emergency and tried to enact a midnight curfew on the third day of the rebellion, workers took over streets and defied the 12 AM deadline, holding their ground into the early morning hours.
Solidarity Rally for Charlotte, Tulsa
In Brooklyn, “No Justice No Peace, No Racist Police” rang out on the streets of Flatbush as a spirited group led by PLP distributed almost 400 CHALLENGES and took turns making speeches on the bullhorn and leading chants in unity with the fight back in Charlotte and Tulsa against the latest police murders.
Family members of two different women murdered by the NYPD, took turns chanting and speaking on the bullhorn. These women have been leading the fight against the KKKops in NYC since Shantel Davis and Kyam Livingston were murdered by the police four years ago and three years ago respectively. Liberal NYC mayor de Blasio’s administration hasn’t provided anything close to justice for these women and their loved ones. We have learned and re-learned that continuing to fight back is the only way we will ever end this racist, capitalist system and all its horrendous attacks against the working class. PLP has grown as several workers and students involved in fighting for justice for victims of police murders have joined the fight for communist revolution.
Fertile Ground for Revolution
Charlotte and Tulsa join Baton Rouge, Baltimore, Ferguson and the Flatbush neighborhood as a site of militant resistance. This learning and inspiration and fight back is part of a long history. It is what gives Progressive Labor Party the confidence that we can and will make a revolutionary change for communism.
Communism means a system run by workers, in the interest of the whole international working class, not for the profit of a few billionaires. Communism means smashing racism and sexism because all of humanity will need to work together to run society, unlike capitalism, which needs these ideologies to divide us so we don’t unite to smash their profit system.
Although communism may still be a long way off, building confidence in the working class brings us a step closer to our revolutionary goal. Inspired by the rebellion in Charlotte, a young black woman volunteered to give her first speech ever on a bullhorn. A passerby asked to sing a song he had written about the need to unite Black and white against racism. When the working class fights back like they have in Charlotte and Tulsa this past week, and more workers strive to help give communist leadership to these struggles, there will be more opportunities to build the revolutionary communist movement that will smash capitalism once and for all.
CHICAGO, September 20—An antiracist rally at the Fraternal Order of Police’s (FOP) turned into a militant march, resulting in one arrest, and a toughening up of antiracist fighters. Over 100multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-generational workers began with a protest at the FOP’s general union meeting.
“How do you spell racist? F.O.P!”
The day was sunny and beautiful, much like the workers who showed up to protest together. The demo began with poster making and mingling and then had a press conference with multiple groups speaking about why they were there. A Progressive Labor Party speaker tied the fight against racist police violence in Chicago directly to capitalism. He also spoke about inspirational international fightback, and ended with calling for a communist revolution. His words were met with cheers and encouraging shouts. The last speaker gave an impassioned reading of the #neverforget coalition’s demands and got everyone turned up to march.
The protesters marched two blocks to the FOP union hall while a parade of cops on bikes pushing us to the sidewalk. They rallied in front of the FOP building, chanting and then hearing speakers from different groups. The mother of Stephon Watts gave a powerful testimonial about her experience with lying, racist police. Stephon was a 15-year-old autistic teen murdered by the kkkops in 2012. The Party had organized fightback around it.
KKKops’ Dirty Tactics
Rather than going home after, they decided to take the streets! The police used their bikes to push us back the sidewalk. The crowd turned right, evading them, and marched a block up and over to the park so they could march in the street. The police frantically ran to the front of the march with their bikes, attempting to block off the whole street. They were too slow. The cops used their bikes as weapons and even hit Stephon’s mother. As other protesters came to her aid, the police grabbed one young man to arrest him and multiple cops took him down. As they rescue the comrade, multiple scuffles broke out but no one else was arrested.
The march concluded at the park, but we were down one working-class brother. A decision was made to go to the police station where they were holding the protester. It was important to show solidarity. The state’s attorney charged him with felony of aggravated battery and resisting arrest. They set bail at $100,000.
We have been trying to fundraise for his bail. He was finally let out of jail 48 hours later. These tactics from the bosses’ police and courts are meant to intimidate us and keep us from speaking out or continuing to protest. But they will fail! The workers and you here will use this new attack from the ruling class to build more support for this young man and destroy this racist system. We will show up to support him, Black and white workers united. The message will be clear to the prosecutors, cops, and bosses: they can’t stop working-class fightback.
Organization Lead to More Confidence
In June, PLP had organized a protest in front of killer cop Jason Van Dyke’s house at 6015 S. Normandy Ave., Chicago IL, 60638. After helping planning a mass committee with various community organizers to organize a follow up protest, PLP returned to their mass organizations to build the action. We did outreach in working-class neighborhoods on the south and west sides. We struggled with each other over possibly getting arrested. We showed our commitment to the action and to our working-class brothers and sisters by participating fully in the planning. We learned some lessons about organizing, such as the limits of conference calls and the importance of face-to-face planning and struggle.
Workers Deserve Communism
PLP will bring commitment and solidarity to every working-class struggle, as well as bring a political analysis that exposes capitalism. We aim to win more workers to our Party through this struggle. This is just the beginning. In order to smash capitalism once and for all, it is important that we entrench ourselves in mass organizations, and class struggle so we can meet more workers but also develop a communist culture with our comrades and friends. Communism is the only path to liberation for working-class people, not “friendly capitalism” or “nationalism” of any kind. We are building a working class army to take power, and set up a world free of kkkops, and exploitation. We need all hands on deck, to build the Party in order to fight for a communist world. From Chicago to Charlotte to Kinshasa, the Congo, workers of the world unite!
HAITI, September 10—Revolutionary struggles worldwide are encountering major challenges, specifically the illusions and false promises made by bourgeois politicians. In Haiti, in every election, activists who call themselves “left” or “revolutionary” and sometimes even “communist,” in fact have joined the ranks of these phony misleaders.
In the last century, the U.S. bosses’ occupation of Haiti brought mass racist terror to workers here. Per Herbert Seligman, writing for The Nation in 1920, said, “Military camps have been built throughout the island. The property of natives has been taken for military use. Haitians carrying a gun were for a time shot at sight. Many Haitians not carrying guns were also shot at sight.” Not only does Haiti’s extreme poverty stem from this occupation, but sexism also pervades working-class lives. A report from the Office of Internal Oversight Services found that U.N. “peacekeepers” have been sexually abusing young women and minors for years!
Politicians Penetrate Revolutionary Struggle
Today, local politicians try co-opting left-leaning workers still not won to communist struggle. This often leads the masses to become cynical and lose confidence in the words and actions of genuine revolutionary leaders. In turn, the bourgeois politicians use the leaders to gain the trust of the masses and maintain power.
The communist PLP fights this trend and combats these revisionist (phony leftist) and reactionary practices. PLP fights for an international communist party to take power by revolution, not by compromise and alliances (for crumbs) with the bosses’ puppets.
Election and Individualist Illusions
In the 2015 parliamentary elections, one of our comrades fell victim to bourgeois politicians. He believed he could co-opt the electoral process to help fellow workers and strengthen the class struggle. He tried convincing the Party his individualism was best. But he knows very well that PLP never collaborates with the bosses in any way, shape or form! Power is not a cake to divvy up! Rather, our aim is to organize the working class by working within mass organizations, putting forward our mass line of struggle against racism and sexism, exposing capitalism and imperialism, engaging in actions and ideological struggle, and finally winning workers and students to our revolutionary communist line, to smash capitalism by establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lessons from the International Working Class
All the PLP comrades in Haiti were united in saying a clear NO to this comrade’s proposal. However, we will continue discussing places, such as Venezuela, Bolivia and others, where the so-called “left” took power through elections, and failed — nor did they aim — to transform the bosses’ electoral power into communist revolutionary power. By studying the lessons from the international working class, we can see that nothing short of a revolution will gain power for our class. Our Party is a revolutionary communist organization and will not make concessions to the bosses. We will fight to win the hearts and minds of workers, to get them en masse to join and lead our Party and win them to communist revolution. We know that the bosses’ elections are a farce, a game of compromise to trap the masses into supporting the bourgeois state.
Short-lived Campaign, Long Live PLP
Our Party has not followed this comrade’s wrong line. Now he seems to understand he was deceived by those who sought him out: the same bourgeois party that endorsed him for the elections financed his opponent’s campaign! He even says he understands the bold and criminal game bourgeois politicians play. Unfortunately he advocated for small advantages, which are not — and won’t be — easily satisfied, since the bosses will not readily allow a new head at the table without such a head being shaped in their own image. By staying true to our principles and refusing to follow the former comrade, the Party emerged the winner and strengthened our line.
Build the Party
Following this logic, our PLP’ers have some influence among revolutionary-leaning comrades in a student organization, in part by putting them on guard to avoid falling into the same trap as our former comrade. One of the presidential candidates in next October’s election has just written a letter trying to woo this student organization — one founded by several PLP members — asking it to discuss the country’s situation in the pre-election period. Obviously he wants to make promises and offer immediate benefits for the organization’s support. But this is just another illusion!
Again, PLP members have adopted a position consistent with our ideas and have won the student organization to it: no meeting and/or alliance with bourgeois politicians, no matter what their promises. We have seen that history records that alliances between left-wing parties and the bourgeois state and its politicians in the elections has only reinforced the capitalist state. PLP built its base among the masses — university and high school students, rural workers, teachers and the unemployed — over the course of several years, fighting side by side in the streets and engaging in ideological struggle.
Ultimately communism will be victorious, if we fight for our revolutionary line, if we are present giving leadership in the mobilizations against the evils of capitalism. We create confidence among the masses and build our base in the working class, building our international revolutionary Party little by little.
No compromise with bourgeois politicians and their state. Long live revolution and the PLP!
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Challenge as Organizing Tool: Int’l School Study Communism
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- 30 September 2016 165 hits
COLOMBIA—A PLP international school was held in Bogota recently; participants included comrades, sympathizers, friends of PL and CHALLENGE readers from the U.S. and Colombia. Comrades from the Central Committee gave an important and motivating report showing how PLP is present with our newspaper CHALLENGE in revolutionary struggles worldwide: Haiti, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Algeria and Mexico among 27 countries internationally.
What stood out clearly is that the Party’s ideas are solid and dialectical. We all agreed that the principle contradiction in the world now is inter-imperialist rivalry and that workers should not support any gang of rulers. Nationalism, revisionism (phony leftism), and reformist ideas are a danger for the working class since they divide and pacify us with their aim to try to “improve” capitalism and its social inequities—an impossible task.
We also agreed with the report and situational analysis by the Colombian comrades, which cited the current capitalist crisis as creating a rise in fascism, racism, war, the super-exploitation of labor and the plunder of the world’s natural resources, leaving workers in misery and desolation. We also analyzed the state of the international proletariat, pointing out that we should continue advancing our work and the study of our communist ideas.
One disagreement arose when a friend defended socialism as a necessary step toward communism. This led to a small debate that clarified the Party’s line on why we fight directly for communism, an aim that has always been the historical goal of the working class. We must also note the important political advances made by the young workers who analyzed the current situation, spoke about their own political activity, and contributed by translating into Spanish the reports given by our North American comrades.
We finished by evaluating the school with our Party comrades, which inspired us to continue working and fighting for communism. We all have the task of building our Party and developing new clubs and study groups. We all must write for CHALLENGE and distribute more copies among our friends and family members to expand our social base with communist ideas.
A comradely hug from our friends and readers. Many thanks and hope for success in the important job of informing the working class.
