The current siege of U.S. police violence against Black and Latin workers and youth sends a dual message. On the one hand, these well-publicized atrocities expose the racist nature of the cops and courts. Many people are led to question whether justice is possible under capitalism, a good starting point to win them to communist ideas.
On the other hand, nonstop murders by criminal cops also speed the rise of fascism. Videotapes of police assaults against Eric Garner (choked to death in Staten Island) or Walter Scott (shot in the back in South Carolina) or Tamir Rice (executed for holding a toy gun in Cleveland) are replayed on television, over and over. In virtually every case, the killer cops are either not indicted or found innocent by the capitalist injustice system. In another legalized lynching in Cleveland, 13 cops fired a total of 137 bullets as they gave chase to an unarmed Black man and woman. Only one cop was indicted; he’d fired 49 times, including 15 shots through the windshield while standing on the hood of the victims’ car after the car was stopped. He was acquitted when the judge declared there was no way to tell whose bullets were the fatal ones.
Repeated exposure to videos of police murders, coupled with no consequences for the perpetrators, sends a clear fascist message: Keep quiet, do as you’re told, and don’t fight back—or you can be murdered, too.
There is also an emphatic sexist aspect to racist terror. Under slavery and for decades thereafter, Black women were commonly assaulted, raped, and tortured by slave-owners, vigilantes, and law enforcement officials. Many women number among the cops’ murder victims; New Yorkers are familiar with the names of Eleanor Bumpurs, Shantel Davis, and Kyam Livingston. On May 16, 2010, in Detroit, seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was shot in the head by kkkop Joseph Weekley as she slept in a no-knock SWAT raid on the wrong home.
In January 2015, after the judge threw out the sole felony charge and two misdemeanor trials ended in hung juries, Aiana’s killer went free.
Hangings and Private Property
In class society, public displays of terror have been the rulers’ stock-in-trade since antiquity. In his book The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh tells of how the poor were criminalized to enable the rising British capitalist class to impose a new concept of private property. There is a clear parallel between the treatment of impoverished white people in 18th-century England and the mass incarceration and brutalization of Black and Latin males in the U.S. today. For capitalists, spectacle murder is a time-tested tool of social control and discipline of the working class. It is designed to frighten other workers into submission and stop rebellions before they start.
Beginning in 1619, when the first Africans were brought in chains to Jamestown, Virginia, Black slaves in North America were beaten into submission. Public hangings were common. A large number were murdered outright; others were worked to death.
Many of these slaves had been warriors in their home villages, trained to fight back. The plantation owners did all they could to suppress Black leadership for rebellion. They broke up Black families and separated slaves who spoke the same African languages. They also segregated slaves from white indentured servants. The rulers knew that multiracial unity could bring their whole system crashing down; their strategy was to divide and conquer.
After the Civil War, freed slaves and poor white people took over the abandoned plantations and began to rebuild. In response, former slave owners and other white businessmen organized the Ku Klux Klan to reignite racism. Successful Black farmers were targeted and their property stolen. Trumped-up charges of rape and other offenses were used to arrest Black men and youths and throw them in jail, where lynch mobs often grabbed them before their day in kangaroo court. The white ruling class also imposed Jim Crow, a system of legal segregation of public schools and housing, buses and bathrooms, movie theaters and restaurants, swimming pools and water fountains. Jim Crow persisted well into the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement and a wave of urban rebellions forced the federal government to outlaw segregation by law—though not, by and large, in effect.
Spectacle Murders, Then and Now
Lynchings were horrific. Victims would be tarred and feathered, mutilated, set afire and burned to death. Hundreds of racists would gather as an audience and to take home parts of the body. Between 1882 and 1968, according to archives compiled by Tuskegee University, there were 4,743 lynchings in the U.S.—a number that does not include all the people who went “missing.” About three-fourths of the victims were Black—most of them male, most in the South. These public spectacles served to foment even more intense racism and to reinforce the divide between Black and white workers, despite the fact that Southern white workers were paid far less than the national standard. Racism kept all poor people down.
The urban rebellions of the 1960s triggered a new wave of spectacle murders; cops killed Black Panthers in their beds. Today the Ku Klux Klan has been supplanted by cops, the Klan in blue. Over the first five months of 2015, according to the Washington Post (5/30/15), at least 385 people were shot and killed by police nationwide—more than twice the rate of fatal police shootings previously acknowledged by the federal government. Among the newspaper’s findings:
About half the victims were white, the other half Black or Latin. But among victims who were unarmed, two-thirds were Black or Latin.
Overall, Black people were killed by cops at three times the rate of white people, even after adjusting for the population of the census tracts where the shootings occurred.
Overall, 16 percent of the victims were either carrying a toy or were unarmed. Twenty percent of the unarmed victims were killed while trying to run away.
Eight of the dead were children younger than 18.
As of the article’s publication date, only three of the 385 fatal shootings—less than 1 percent—had resulted in a cop being charged with a crime.
But despite the power of the state to commit and whitewash state-sanctioned racist murder, generations of workers—men and women, Black and white—have never stopped fighting back. In the late 1920s, the Communist Party USA challenged Jim Crow and led an anti-lynching campaign in the Deep South. Progressive Labor Party has consistently organized against police terror, dating back to the 1979 summer project in Tupelo, Mississippi. From Harlem and Watts to Ferguson and Baltimore, workers have drawn the line and counter-attacked police in violent urban rebellions. More than three years after Shantel Davis was shot and killed by cops as she tried to drive away, outraged workers still stage regular demonstrations in her memory—and to remind the ruling class that we do not forget.
Under the profit system, Black lives don’t matter because the capitalists need to intimidate and divide us to maintain their control. All that matters to the bosses are their super-profits. They’ve shown their willingness to kill millions—from the streets of the U.S. to the Middle East—to keep what they have and grab for more.
All workers’ lives will be valued only when a communist revolution by the international working class, led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, smashes capitalism and the racist terror it relies upon. Forward!
Why are millions in the Middle East, Europe and North America attracted to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL or Daesh)? Part of the answer lies in the defeat of the old communist movement, which left a vacuum to be filled by rotten capitalist ideologies. One such ideology is radical Islam. Alienated young people have no alternative vision, no objective explanation for the horrors of capitalism, no organization to lead the fight for a better life.
Failure of the Old Movement
Through much of the 20th century, throughout the Middle East, there were large, pro-Soviet parties. In the early 1950s, Iran had the world’s largest non-ruling phony “communist” party. In the 1960s, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser inspired—and misled—millions with his denunciations of imperialism and capitalist greed. He also attacked what he called “feudal reactionary” Islam, while praising his fellow nationalist capitalists and “anti-imperialist” Muslim clerics. Throughout the 1970s, governments in Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and Libya, among others, all claimed to be socialist and anti-imperialist. They denounced Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, for tilting in favor of U.S. imperialism. In the 1980s, workers across the Middle East were attracted to movements that claimed to be more leftist than the ruling “socialists.” In Iran, Turkey and Palestine, these movements had millions of followers.
With the reversion of the Soviet Union and China to capitalism, even the pretense of progressive politics in the Middle East disintegrated. Ruling classes across the region peddled the lie that “communism failed.” In fact, what had failed was socialism and nationalism. What had failed were leaders who claimed they could reform their way to a better world—without violent revolution and real communist ideas. That is why PLP fights as one international working class to smash all borders with an armed revolution that leads directly to communism.
Today, in the absence of a mass communist movement, capitalist rulers see less need to channel angry workers into reform movements. Instead, they rely primarily on repression. From the U.S. to Saudi Arabia and Israel, the capitalists’ “war on terror” labels any who resist ruling-class oppression as terrorists.
The misleaders in the Middle East are oil-thirsty capitalists dressed as religious fundamentalists. Each group is worse than the last, from the Salafist Saudi rulers to Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda to ISIS. Each year these reactionary forces grow more extreme and sexist. The Saudi Salafis prohibit women from driving. The Taliban bans secular education and forces women to cover themselves head to toe. ISIS kidnaps women for forced marriage as it sings the praises of slavery and the beheading non-believers.
Racist ISIS Illusions Broken
ISIS has drawn heavily from Saddam Hussein’s old army, and it knows how to organize. It offers:
An analysis of Western imperialism that can be superficially appealing but at best incomplete.
A vision of “true Islam” and restoration of an Islamic “caliphate.” In reality, ISIS has no more to do with early Islam than the Pope and his band of Vatican thieves relate to early Christianity. It is a standard, top-down, capitalist dictatorship, run for the benefit of a small group at the top.
An organization that welcomes and incorporates recruits into a tight structure, even those who may not be particularly religious at first. With the aid of social media, ISIS is adept at spreading its ideology in the face of intense repression. (By contrast, Al-Qaeda offers no comparable vision, and its paranoia prevents it from welcoming most potential recruits.) But despite Its emphasis on “the Muslim community” and its disdain for national borders, ISIS is both nationalist and racist. Ninety percent of its top posts are held by Iraqis, while African recruits are paid less and assigned worse jobs than Europeans.
The more ISIS advances, the more brutal it has become. Its rule relies on terror, nationalism, and oppression of women rather than winning mass support.
For the millions of unemployed, alienated youth searching for an answer, the solution is communism. The job of Progressive Labor Party is to redouble our efforts to ensure that the next generations of angry workers turn not to religious fanaticism or any other capitalist ideology, but instead to revolutionary communism. This means fighting racism and sexism head-on! We are building a movement where women are militant mass leaders, not targets of sexist violence. It is our responsibility to win more people to our analysis, our communist vision, and an organization that empowers workers rather than enslaving them.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union. For several months, the Red Army retreated. In October, and again in December, the Red Army counterattacked, driving the fascists back. This was the first time the Nazi-led forces had been stopped. In 1940 French and British troops had been quickly routed by the German Wehrmacht.
The USSR was invaded not by Germany alone. Most of continental Europe, already occupied by Germany, poured its industry, raw materials, and human resources into the invasion. Units from almost every European country fought on the side of the Nazi army. It’s more accurate, therefore, to refer to Hitler’s military as the “Fascist” forces. Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Italy also declared war on the USSR and sent large-scale armies to the invasion. These same armies collaborated in the mass murder of 15 million Soviet civilians, including two-thirds of the 6 million Jews killed by the fascists.
The Red Army faced 80 percent of all the Fascist forces, far more than did the Western Allies. More Soviet soldiers were killed in the taking of Berlin than U.S. soldiers killed during the entire war.
Early on in World war II, there is compelling evidence that the Western Allies had tried hard to help Hitler conquer the Soviet Union. There is a huge amount of evidence of this. For example:
The “Munich” sellout of October 1938, where the Britain and France gave democratic Czechoslovakia to Hitler without even informing the Czech government (first the Sudetenland, then in March 1939 the rest of the country). The Bank of England even transferred the Czech gold reserves to Hitler!
The refusal of the Polish government to endorse “collective security” against Hitler. Josef Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, refused to sign any agreement that would permit the Red Army to enter Polish territory in order to engage the German army. This one act guaranteed World War II and the destruction of Poland.
A few years ago, evidence was discovered in the Russian Archives that suggested that Beck was a German agent. In any case, he certainly acted like one.
The refusal by the British government in August 1939 to sign a mutual defense treaty with the USSR against Nazi Germany, thus guaranteeing Hitler’s victory against Poland in September 1939.
The refusal of Britain and France to defend Poland when Hitler invaded it on September 1, 1939, despite their mutual defense treaty with Poland.
The “phony war” of September 1939 to May 1940, when France and the UK, though formally at war with Hitler, refused to engage his forces.
The attempt by the UK and France to send an army to fight against the USSR on the side of pro-Germany Finland during the Russo-Finnish War of December 1939 to March 1940.
The Soviet victory heralded the advance of communism throughout the world. This terrified the capitalists, who began inventing lie after lie about the Soviet role in the war, the Red Army, and the communist forces generally. These lies continue to be spread today, as is evident in Bloodlands, the recent book by Yale professor Timothy Snyder. It is yet another attempt to equate Stalin and Hitler, communism and fascism.
It’s important to expose these lies, though that never stops the anti-communists from spreading them and inventing others.
Meanwhile, World War II is portrayed as “the Good War” in Western capitalist countries. A good book that unmasks this myth is Jacques Pauwels’ The Myth of the Good War.
New Communist Force Needed Today
Today, fascism is once again on the advance. Without the example and the threat of a socialist bloc, the world’s capitalists see no reason not to drive the living standards of workers as low as they can possibly go. All over the world, capitalist forces are assaulting the wages, benefits, and living standards of working people. In Europe, the “welfare state” is under sharp attack. In the US, what little social welfare we enjoyed is being swiftly eroded.
To support this new fascism the old forces of extreme nationalism and patriotism, sexism, racism, anti-immigrant racism, anti-Semitism, prejudice, religious ideologies, and anti-communism are being pushed with renewed intensity. The capitalists aim to divert workers’ attention from their oppression under the profit system. Meanwhile, the capitalists get richer and richer. As in the past, the logic of capitalist exploitation is international competition and war—eventually another world war. Capitalism leads to war for imperial conquest and to divide up the world’s riches.
This is a dismal future! The question is, what can we do about it? The answer is simple. We need another worldwide movement for communism! One that has learned from the errors of the communist movements of the 20th century while building on their successes. There is no other way forward for the international working class. Let’s get to it!
Openly racist Nazi forces are now integrated into Ukraine’s military and are receiving training from the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade.
The U.S.-funded Ukrainian government in Kiev has merged the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and several other battalions into the Ministry of Defense. Further, the foremost neo-Nazi leader in Ukraine, Dmitry Yarosh, has been made a Special Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Army. And according to the Minister of the Interior, the U.S. Army is now training Azov.
Yarosh is the leader of Right Sector, a political movement initiated by the CIA-backed Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that closely collaborated with Hitler. Through several armed formations (notably the UPA, or “Ukrainian People’s Army”), the OUN killed over a million Jews, Poles, Russians and others during World War II. Right Sector and its military arm, Azov battalion, openly embrace the wartime OUN leaders, Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko, as well as the UPA.
On April 20, components of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade began training the Azov Battalion, according to Arsen Avakov, Minister of Internal Affairs. U.S. agencies have said they are training three “National Guard” units without identifying them. With the merger of Azov with Aidar and Sich units, which also have Nazi ties, they are now called National Guard.
As further evidence of the Nazification of the Ukrainian regime in Kiev, a law was passed banning all symbols, expressions of sympathy or political actions labeled communist. The law creates new memorials for fascists like Bandera, Stetsko, as well as for the UPA—for those perpetrating mass extermination in World War II!
While the law ostensibly bans symbols of German Nazism, it glorifies Ukrainian Nazism. Ironically, the Azov Battalion uses three German Nazi symbols in its literature, on its flags and on its military unit patches, without fear of penalty. This law to criminalize historical truth and political belief, speech and behavior was inspired by pressure brought last October by Right Sector/Azov and others, such as the Svoboda party.
The Obama administration calls the shots in the Ukraine, primarily through Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland to Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk, who has been on the U.S. payroll for many years. U.S. policy aims to strengthen the Nazi forces in western Ukraine to use them to beat down the rebels in the east.
By giving these fascists state power, however, the U.S. is making other allies nervous. General Waldemar Skrzypczak, a Polish retired general and now a deputy defense minister, has long been an anti-Russian hard-liner. But after the law was passed glorifying “bloodthirsty nationalism” he withdrew his support for Ukraine and suggests that Poland will now have trouble supporting Kiev. His family was a victim of the UPA; its massacres in 1943 are well-known in Poland.
Recently the U.S. Congress demanded more lethal military aid to Ukraine.
The merger of the Nazis into the Ministry of Defense increases resources for the Nazis by burying it in general military aid, so that donor nations are not criticized for helping groups like Azov.
The Azov Battalion, like neo-Nazis everywhere, makes a big deal about the symbolism encoded in dates and numbers—like “88,” which refers not only to the millimeter gun size of Hitler’s biggest tanks, but also to the eighth letter of the alphabet, HH, for Heil Hitler.
Another highly symbolic date is April 20, Hitler’s birthday. On this day, the neo-Nazis get the gift of a lifetime: six months of expert U.S. military training. Money for Nazis, but none to stop water shutoffs, school shutdowns and home foreclosures.
The working class in Ukraine has no stake in any of the bosses’ camps. As tensions heat up, the choices for workers are clear: racist Nazis or communist revolution?
To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of Progressive Labor Party, CHALLENGE is publishing a series of articles on our Party’s history, from its origins as the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) to its presence today in more than two dozen countries worldwide. This issue reviews one of PLP/PLM’s historic fights against racism.
In the class war to overthrow capitalism, fighting racism is a strategic necessity. When the bosses divide Black and white workers, the entire working class is denied the potential of Black workers’ leadership in the fight for armed communist revolution. In the United States, drawing from their historical super-oppression, Black workers led the battle against slavery. They have stood on the front lines in major strikes, in the fight for jobs and in other attacks on the profit system. 
Ever since the 17th century, when Black slaves were first brought to the Americas from Africa, racism has been the keystone of the U.S. capitalist system. Racism pits groups of workers against one another, diluting our class’s strength in battles against the rulers. Racism enables the bosses to use lower-paid Black and Latin workers as a wedge against white workers struggling to improve wages and working conditions. As a result, the capitalist ruling class takes greater profits from all workers while stealing super-profits—totaling hundreds of billions of dollars a year—from Black and Latin workers.
By claiming that some workers are superior to others, racism devalues human life. To continue to build our Party, and ultimately to lead a communist revolution against the capitalist class, we must put the fight against racism and for multiracial, working-class unity front and center.
Harlem Rebellion
In 1964, the young Progressive Labor Movement played a lead role in the historic Harlem Rebellion, the first Black-led urban uprising of the era against police terror. On July 16, an off-duty cop, Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan, shot and murdered James Powell, a 15-year-old, 122-pound ninth-grader, in cold blood. For six consecutive nights, the anger of the Black masses boiled over in open rebellion in central Harlem and then in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Thousands of militant youth took to the streets, directing their anger at the cops and at price-gouging store owners. Molotov cocktails were hurled at shops and police cars. Thousands of cops were rushed to Harlem to quell the revolt, but it continued to spread. Thousands of gunshots were exchanged.
Mayor Robert Wagner and his police commissioner put Harlem under virtual martial law, outlawing demonstrations, rallies and marches. Civil rights misleaders tried to control the crowd by calling for “peaceful protest,” but were ignored. The phony “leftist” Communist Party USA (CPUSA) backed these reformist pleas for peace at any price. PLM was the only force to give political direction to the spontaneous rebellion.
Thousands of PLM posters declaring, “WANTED FOR MURDER, GILLIGAN THE COP!” were circulated throughout Harlem and beyond. Thousands of copies of CHALLENGE—first published a few weeks earlier—were distributed. Rebels marched in the streets with the paper’s front page as their flag.
PLM pointed out that the rebellion was also directed against Harlem’s pervasive racist conditions: an unemployment rate three times as high as the city as a whole; half the city’s average family income; three times the ratio of substandard housing; nearly twice the infant mortality rate. Black women workers were and are the most exploited section of the working class. This fight against racism was yoked to the fight against sexism. Though anti-sexist class-consciousness was not at the forefront, the Rebellion was also a fight against these sexist living and working conditions in Harlem.
Bosses Attack PL
The bosses’ media viciously attacked PL for “inciting riots.” The CPUSA called us “adventurist.” Our leaders’ lives were threatened, and they were tailed by the cops’ Red Squad 24 hours a day. Several were arrested for defying the rulers’ bans on demonstrations and for “inciting to riot,” which carried a potential sentence of 20 years in jail.
Specifically, PLM was enjoined from organizing marches between 110th Street and 155th Street for the whole width of Manhattan. We defied the ban and led a demonstration in the heart of Harlem. The Harlem PLM chapter leader was convicted and jailed for “inciting a riot,” as were the printers who made the Gilligan poster. Dozens of PL’ers and friends were subpoenaed before a grand jury and threatened with contempt citations, and several were convicted and served prison time. An international defense campaign was launched; leftist philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, spoke out on our members’ behalf.
Although the rebellion soon subsided, our Party’s reputation stayed strong in Black communities throughout the U.S. In San Francisco, where we had been virtually unknown, nearly 500 militant Black workers and youth turned out to hear a PLM leader give an eyewitness report of the Harlem struggle. Following Harlem, more than 100 cities nationwide, not content with “cooling it,” felt the torch of rebellion.
Our role in the Harlem Rebellion is a testament to PL’s lifelong committment to fighting racism. This is part and parcel of defeating capitalism. We envision a world where the very concept of race will be abolished. We will build a communist society where all workers have the same opportunity to use all their potential to advance humanity and the planet. Join us in building the next generation of international leaders against racism.
