STATEN ISLAND, NY, July 18 —  “We are going to continue to fight to build a mass struggle around the issues of racism and police brutality, the only way we can bring any change. Electing politicians won’t change anything!” This declaration of defiance was made today by two dozen workers on the steps to the office of Staten Island Congressman Dan Donovan.
The rally was called to commemorate Eric Garner’s murder and condemn this racist politician. Donovan made sure that the grand jury didn’t indict Garner’s murderer, killer kkkop Daniel Pantaleo, or anybody else for Eric Garner’s murder. He even had the courageous Ramsay Orta, who took the video of Pantaleo’s choke hold, arrested and indicted three times!
Students, campus workers, professors and the local community responded to the urgency of forming a multiracial, anti-racist organization at the College of Staten Island: Staten Island Against Racism and Police Brutality. One group member stated that New York’s “broken windows” policing is the problem, and that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio his appointed police commissioner, William Bratton, are directly responsible for Eric Garner’s murder. As another worker noted, if Pantaleo couldn’t be indicted, a cop will never beheld accountable for killing a Black man.
The Progressive Labor Party salutes the bold community members taking this anti-racist struggle forward! PLP is building a mass, international anti-racist movement of millions to destroy the root of racism—capitalism—with armed communist revolution. We invite these bold fighters in Staten Island to share their lessons and struggles with us, and help us forge a future without racist police terror.

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I was invited to a vigil for Sandra Bland this weekend in Brooklyn by a group of college student activists. Bland, who died in jail in Texas on July 13, is one of the latest victims of racist police terror. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Bland committed suicide or was murdered, but one of the participants at the vigil summed it up: “Sandra would be alive today if she had never encountered that police officer.”
The vigil was poignant and well organized. Everyone had a chance to speak and share their thoughts. Two participants spoke of revolution. Many young women spoke of how Sandra’s death hit home. People agreed that having marches and vigils in working-class communities was better than organizing rallies in the downtown area.
The group of mostly young women marched through Prospect Park and leaflets were given to onlookers. A few people joined, including a young Russian student who spoke of the racism faced by African workers there.
PLP has been saying that we must not “get used” to all the injustices of capitalism and that we should take every opportunity to fight back. These young women, including two students in my class, did a great job of making a statement. Let’s keep fighting back—every day, in every way!

Within the Black Lives Matter movement, there is confusion over the meaning and significance of “white supremacy.” As communists, we need to understand what the term means to folks who are actually using it. Distorted ideas can weaken working-class struggle against racism, capitalism and for workers’ power. Yet many advocates of these ideas may simply not yet be familiar with the richness of class analysis, which includes anti-racism at its core. Our discussions with such potential comrades need to be clear and friendly, and help move the struggle forward.  
“White supremacy” can certainly be used to characterize obvious groups like the historic Citizens Councils and the KKK. The U.S. ruling class has used white supremacist ideology as a prop for capitalism. But some people who decry “white supremacy” miss its ideological function. They conclude that “white privilege” offers all white people advantages over Black and Latin workers in all aspects of life.  The Progressive Labor Party always tries to clarify that the condition for most white workers and their families is one of oppression—less, in general, than the oppression experienced by Black workers, but oppression nonetheless. There is, therefore, an objective basis for unity of the oppressed.  White workers and students who are anti-racist are not “allies”—they are comrades in the struggle!
At an AFL-CIO panel in DC, the white supremacy argument was directed toward the historically white leaders of unions who limited positions within unions to white workers. But the greater issue for the unions today is the failure to militantly fight the bosses. Union leaders should fight for economic and social justice for all workers and broaden the struggle for equality to issues beyond wages and benefits for their immediate members. But few do this as they capitulate to the needs of capital.  
A PLP member noted that many union leaders failed to support workers’ struggles in the Detroit auto strike and the DC Metro strike in the 1970s. He called for unions to attack capitalism itself and destroy it.  Both Black and white politicians and union leaders have attacked worker’s struggles. A better analysis would focus on the capitalist class and their supporters in labor—the class traitors  Marx called “the labor aristocracy.” Replacing white union leaders with Black leaders does not change the equation if they, too, play the role of sellouts.
What many people think of as “white privilege” cannot be denied in a day-to-day functioning of society. Disparities in health, housing, jobs and education are apparent.   That’s racism! Background checks hurt Black workers more than white workers because of racist attacks on Black workers in the so-called War on Drugs that led to mass incarceration.  But white workers are also oppressed by capitalism. They need to destroy capitalism and replace it with a communist society as well. How then to build unity and solidarity?
PLP recognizes that only by taking on the sharpest anti-racist struggles can we build this unity. Black and Latin leaders (including PLPers!) are crucial to success.  In DC we have supported the transit workers’ struggles for years and led the 1978 wildcat strike. This predominantly Black workforce is increasingly under attack with new job rules, extended wage progressions, rigid background checks and privatization.  The years-long struggle against racist police brutality was central to our work in Prince George’s County and DC. We have engaged in public health struggles over AIDS, housing and mass incarceration.  Multiracial unity has been essential to advancing these struggles.
Many Black workers do not see Black capitalism as a solution, but they may be influenced by the rhetoric to organize with nationalist formations.  This reinforces the divisions in the working class and limits the ability to build a truly revolutionary movement. Racism in Europe and Asia leads to similar nationalist formations. PLP has opposed this thinking for the past 40 years and continues to try to unite all workers against capitalism in a single international party.
We have to explore the meaning of the current language of “white privilege” with our friends, point out the reactionary direction such ideology takes the movement, and continue to struggle for multiracial unity among leaders and members of the mass organizations to which we belong.

Tanzania is home to the genocide of workers who have a condition known as albinism. The genocide occurs mainly in the city of Mwanza and in the mining regions of Geita, Kagera, and Shinyanga. The Progressive Labor Party in Tanzania is the only group connecting this genocide to capitalism, and we fight for a communist world where it will be abolished!
Albinism is an inherited, genetic skin condition caused by a mutation affecting the enzyme in human skin responsible for skin, hair, and eye color.  It’s believed that albino workers were persecuted in many other places and fled to Tanzania, which may explain why Tanzania has the greatest concentration of albino people in the world.  Tanzania is a former British colony, and the British encouraged beliefs that albino workers were cursed. These racist superstitions led many albino infants to be thrown away in the forests.
Capitalism Keeps Racist Colonial Legacy Alive
British colonialism ended in the early 1960s with an upsurge of anti-racism and anti-imperialism among workers and peasants.  The sellout nationalist government was pressured to outlaw violence against albino workers. Under capitalism, however, all reforms are short-lived. In 1985, a capitalist crisis struck Tanzania, forcing the government to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the U.S. imperialist-backed bank. After waves of IMF decrees destroyed the educational system and welfare and led to a massive increase in poverty, the ruling class of Tanzania brought anti-albino racism back with a vengeance. Murders of albino workers began again, this time out of the belief that their body parts would bring wealth if presented to a witch doctor.
Since 2006, 76 albino workers were killed and 56 injured, 11 of those with permanent injuries. Eighteen albino graves have been desecrated and the bodies removed. In 2014, an albino child known as Upendo Emanuel was kidnapped and still hasn’t been found. This past February 15, another child, one year-old Yohana Bahati, was taken from his mother, who was cut up with machetes. Later, when the child’s grave was dug up, some of Yohana’s body parts were missing.
Only Communism Can Protect All Workers
Violence between workers will continue as long as capitalism remains. The capitalist government of Tanzania can never truly address these crimes because it’s the capitalist ruling class that profits off of the division of the working class. These capitalists support the racist superstitions against albino workers, along with apartheid-like laws against many of the country’s 120 ethnic groups. This keeps workers from seeing capitalism as their enemy and communist revolution as their solution.
In 1992, greater “freedoms” were supposedly given to workers here by allowing multiple capitalist electoral parties to compete in elections. The result has been more poverty and more terror, especially against the albino population.
Workers in Tanzania, like workers in Greece, the United States and everywhere else, must unite behind the red banner of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. PLP will eradicate the capitalist dictatorship that thrives off imperialism and genocide worldwide with a dictatorship of millions of armed workers organized in our Party to build communism.
PLP in Tanzania has been organizing CHALLENGE study groups among workers on anti-albino racism. We are bringing this fight against superstition, racism, sexism, and capitalism to  schools and workplaces to demand an end to the killings. These struggles are strengthening us for the revolutionary struggles to come.

It’s inspiring to read that high school students are leading classes in political economy (“Spring Communist School: Youth Take Lead Building for Revolution,” CHALLENGE, 4/22). However, we need to correct a mistake in one part of the article that says that capitalist crises, also known as depressions or recessions, occur because workers can’t “buy back” what they produce. Depressions and recessions are actually periodic “crises of overproduction,” meaning too much of something is produced for capitalists to make a profit.
The most recent recession, in 2007-2008, began with overproduction of houses. In spite of mass homelessness and a general housing shortage for workers, like everything produced under capitalism, profitability isn’t related to how many workers are able to buy homes. Capitalists can only realize profits when competing groups of capitalists sell more homes and expand their share of the market.
In the last boom year, 2006, 1.05 million new homes were sold in the U.S. In 2007, only 774,000 (CNN Money, 1/28/08), despite a cut in the average price of 10.4 percent. CNN wrote, “Glut of homes driving down prices,” and noted that “Lennar, the nation’s largest home builder, reported a $1.25 billion fourth-quarter loss, the largest in the company’ s history.”
Lennar and its five or six major national competitors all knew the housing boom — fueled by cheap and fraudulent mortgages — would end, as every previous housing boom had ended. They kept building as fast as they could, borrowing money to buy land, equipment, and materials and to hire more construction workers—they were in a race. To survive, each had to capture a larger and larger market share. Each reasoned that if they could pile up profits fast, they could get through the bust stronger than their competitors, maybe even drive one or two out of business, and emerge in an even stronger position during the next boom.
Capitalist crises have happened every 10 years or so in every capitalist country for centuries, and communists and their friends must be armed with the understanding that it’s not because workers cannot buy back their products.
Workers are never paid the full value of what they produce. For every house or car a group of workers build, they receive a fraction of its value as a wage. The full value is realized when the capitalist sells it, and the difference is called “surplus value,” or profit.
Workers never have enough money to “buy back” what they produce. Much of what they produce is meant to be bought by capitalist institutions or by the capitalist class itself, not by workers. A few examples: machine tools, construction and mining equipment, oil wells, pipelines, military and police gear, roads, bridges, tunnels, large trucks, buses, railroad cars, airports, commercial airliners, business jets, factories, office buildings, hospitals, medical equipment, luxury goods.
It’s impossible to predict exactly when the next bust will occur, and dropping out of the race while the boom is still on means giving up a competitive advantage. The “anarchy of capitalist production” is built into the system. Capitalists know they will end up with more product than they can sell, but they have to produce it anyway. The boom generates the bust.
Returning to the 2007 crisis, it began in the housing sector but soon became a general crisis. Homebuilders canceled orders for construction equipment (bulldozers, cranes, power tools), materials (lumber, bricks cement, wire, pipes) and appliances (furnaces, air conditioners, sinks, toilets, stoves, refrigerators). The suppliers in turn stopped buying steel, aluminum, rubber, and electricity. The homebuilders, suppliers, mortgage lenders, title insurers, and real estate agencies laid off workers, who cut back on purchases of consumer goods.
Trade union leaders and liberal politicians put forward the “buy back” explanation because it supports their position that capitalism, by paying higher wages, can be fundamentally reformed to benefit the working class. They then say that to prevent these crises, the bankers and bosses have to stop being so greedy and pay workers more.
Communists must not put forward this false explanation. Instead, we must demonstrate that crises are inherent to capitalism, part of its competitive essence. While some individual capitalists certainly appear more greedy and callous in their disregard for the working class than others, these periodic crises have nothing to do with individual greed. As capitalist crises worsen, the need for capitalists to conquer other rival bosses’ labor markets and resources through imperialist war sharpens. Crises will end only when the system that causes them, capitalism, is destroyed by communist revolution.