NEW YORK CITY, March 21 — “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” “The Cops, The Courts, The Ku Klux Klan, All Are Part of the Bosses’ Plan!”

About 2,500 demonstrators, mainly black and Latino youth, defied the NYPD and protested the February 26 racist murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman — a racist one-man neighborhood watch vigilante in Sanford, Florida. At this writing, Zimmerman remains free. 

Most demonstrators demanded Zimmerman’s arrest and conviction. While hundreds regrouped before a second march, a PLP member pointed out that racism won’t stop until we stop the racist system of capitalism. “They want us to elect Obama again. But Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Amadou Diallo, Ramarley Graham — how many more people will have to die before we realize we need communist revolution?”

Block Police Convoy 

Young working-class students chose to fight back instead of obeying “rules.” Without permission or a permit, young people led the crowd into the streets, literally leaving two black liberal City Councilmen behind. The march surged as thousands more workers and youth joined from the sidewalks. Protestors threw large plastic safety dividers into the streets to block a convoy of police cars that were using their blinding lights and blaring sirens in an attempt to push protestors onto the sidewalk.

At one point the City Councilmen’s staffers pleaded with PLP members using the bullhorn to take the crowd to the politicians. “The leadership of the march is this way,” they insisted, pointing in the opposite direction from where everyone was marching. PLP marched with the masses, defied the politicians and led with chants of “Racist Cops, You Can’t Hide, We Charge You with Genocide,” and “Asian, Latin, Black and White, to Smash Racism We Must Unite!”

‘A Badge Or A Swastika’

Some marchers taunted police with the chant, “Is that a badge or a swastika?” Most demonstrators aimed their anger at the racist NYPD, broadening a protest of one racist murder in Florida into a condemnation of the systematic racism of U.S. law enforcement.

“Don’t shoot me, don’t hurt me, for skittles and ice tea,” youth cried, referring to the candy and drink Trayvon carried as Zimmerman stalked him from the store. Rush-hour traffic was shut down as mini-marches spun off to Times Square, the Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park and circled Union Square. 

The rally was organized online on short notice and gained national attention when Trayvon’s parents announced they would attend. Trayvon’s Dad told the young crowd, “You are all Trayvon.” His Mom said, “It’s not a black and white thing, it’s a right and wrong thing,” and told the crowd to “stand up for what’s right!” The family’s lawyer said that after the murder, the racist cops investigated Trayvon’s background but not Zimmerman’s.

One contingent returned to Union Square and opened a discussion about what to do next, march to Times Square or City Hall. A PLP’er said that in the future, we should march where the workers are: “Harlem, not Times Square; Flatbush, Brooklyn, not City Hall.” We invited people to our May Day march in Brooklyn on Saturday, April 28. 

We reviewed the action with some new-found friends. We made several contacts and distributed CHALLENGES. We participated on short notice and gave political leadership. One teacher plans to teach a lesson about Trayvon’s case and the protest in class next week and we will have anti-racist actions on our jobs and in our schools.

The racist profit system has killed two black teenagers — Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and Ramarley Graham in the Bronx, N.Y. — and 17 unnamed Afghan working-class civilians. These horrendous murders are nearly beyond comprehension. But the history of capitalism is the story of racist slaughter. These outrageous, cold-blooded killings prove it once again.

A racist vigilante — a self-appointed neighborhood watchdog — stalked Trayvon, 17, who was innocently walking to a friend’s house carrying only candy and soda. Trayvon was fatally shot, the vigilante said, because he was “suspicious” (see page 3 and 4). This “suspicion” was based solely on the fact that he was “walking while black” in a mostly white neighborhood. After local police stated that the killer, George Zimmerman, acted in self-defense, they let him walk free. Only working-class fury over the murder forced the temporary ouster of the Sanford police chief, whose force has a history of ignoring violent crimes against black residents. Only nationwide protests — and the threat of more militant action — forced the state and federal governments to launch their own belated investigations, a month after the fact.

But the power of racism cannot be underestimated. In a disgusting ploy to blame the victim, the bosses’ media have put out an unsubstantiated report that the unarmed Trayvon, who had no juvenile offender record, attacked his stalker before he was shot.   

Ramarley Graham was confronted by a wolf pack of Bronx cops who said they “thought” he had a gun and chased him into his grandmother’s apartment on the “suspicion” that he possessed marijuana. Then they killed the unarmed 18-year-old outright (see page 3). 

Beyond the official lies and cover-ups, here are the facts: The Ku Klux Klan in blue has put down two more young people as if they were animals. Two more families have been cheated of seeing their children live out their lives. These murders are crimes against the entire working class. We are all Trayvon Martin and Ramarley Graham.

Then there is the massacre of eight Afghan adults and nine sleeping children by a soldier trained as a killer by a U.S. imperialist war machine (see CHALLENGE, 3/28.) He left his base, went door-to-door to three villagers’ homes, shot the helpless people, and returned to his base. Then he went back to finish the job, callously burning the dead bodies.

But individual cops, those who want to act like cops, and “deranged” soldiers aren’t the main killers. It’s the unchecked racism of the capitalist system that breeds these atrocities against our class. They will continue and get worse, for one stark reason: The bosses benefit from racism.

Racism and Super-Profits

Racist wage differentials and mass unemployment reduce wages for all workers. By lowering family income for black and Latino workers as compared to white workers, the U.S. bosses net at least $300 billion annually. At the same time, the bosses are free to cut the wages of white workers by threatening to replace them with black and Latino workers. Racism hurts the entire working class.

The same division and exploitation holds true worldwide, and in many places is even more extreme. By attacking wages and working conditions for workers on six continents, the world’s capitalists reap trillions in super-profits.

Racist cop terror and racist mass imprisonment reduce the threat of urban rebellion, one of the bosses’ biggest fears. Racist segregation further weakens working-class unity and the ability to fight back. And racist dehumanization of “foreign enemies,” relentlessly hammered into GIs by the U.S. brass (see below), furnishes the “will to kill” needed by U.S. rulers to conduct their widening oil wars. 

The crocodile tears shed by U.S. President Barack Obama and all his politician cohorts, black, Latino and white, are exposed by the racist system they represent. They use their hypocritical shows of sorrow to cover the racism that kills, kills, kills in wars worldwide.

The sharpening global competition between U.S. and rival imperialists is cutting into U.S. profit rates. As a result, the international working class is facing escalating racist attacks from U.S. bosses who are determined to boost their profits. 

One such assault is the “new face of labor,” the ugly offspring of union bosses’ alliance with U.S. capitalists. In early March, AFL-CIO hacks trumpeted the unionization of a few car washers in Los Angeles. The “triumph” of $8-dollar-an-hour wages for the mostly Latino workers amounts to $16,000 a year, barely half the poverty threshold that makes a family of four eligible to receive free school lunches.

Then, following Obama’s bailout of GM and Chrysler, wages were “restructured” to pay new hires $14 an hour, half the pay of veteran workers. In another union “victory,” giant Caterpillar Inc. recently moved locomotive production from London, Ontario, which paid workers $30 an hour, to a new plant in Muncie, Indiana, which offered only $14 and far lower benefits. Big Auto’s sellout pacts, greased by Obama and George Bush, Jr., provided the precedent.

The racism in the auto industry is shown clearly in the U.S. southern states, where lower-paying contractors have infiltrated even the unionized factories. At auto parts plants, which are erected close by and sometimes within existing auto assembly plants, both black and white workers are paid as little as $8 an hour, barely above the minimum wage. Why have the auto bosses targeted the South? Because that’s where the ruling class has historically enforced intense Jim Crow racism, which busted unions and imposed the worst wages and dangerous conditions in the U.S. Again, racism leads the bosses to make billions in super-profits.

Stop, Frisk, Shoot, Jail

Beset by increasing foreign competition, mainly from China, U.S. industrialists have fewer manufacturing jobs to dole out. To control the disproportionately black and Latin unemployed, capitalists call out their killer cops. In New York City, multi-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly staunchly defend their “stop-and-frisk” campaign against young black and Latino men. The racist policy hits nearly 750,000 young workers a year and can easily become stop-frisk-and-shoot, as Ramarley Graham’s killing shows.

Incarceration rates reflect the U.S. bosses’ heightening racist crackdown on increasingly jobless and alienated workers. After holding steady from the 1920s on (with a brief spike during the Great Depression), the number of those jailed or on probation or parole began to skyrocket in the 1970s. That was the period when U.S. rulers were rattled by defeat in Vietnam and challenges from Europe and Russia.

Before 1975, the norm for the number in custody was one million. Today, with U.S. control of the Middle East at severe risk and China rising, it’s five million. Black and Latino workers are seven times more likely to find themselves in custody than white workers. 

In the name of patriotism and “national security,” Bloomberg and Kelly have extended this racism throughout the New York metropolitan region by spying on innocent Arab and South Asian workers, including Christian immigrants from Middle East countries. If we fail to fight racism against these groups, it will engulf our entire class.

GIs and Racist Brainwashing

The racist rampage in Afghanistan, shocking as it is, pales in body count compared to Obama-authorized night raids and air strikes that have wiped out thousands of innocent civilians. It reflects the deliberate racist indoctrination that U.S. military officers inflict on recruits to make them more efficient killers, pawns in the bosses’ push to consolidate oil-producing territory (see CHALLENGE, 3/28). Iraq War veteran Michael Prysner said:

When I first joined the army, we were told that racism no longer existed in the military....And then Sept. 11 happened. I began to hear new words like “towel head,” “camel jockey” and — the most disturbing — “sand n....r.” These words did not initially come from my fellow soldiers, but from my superiors — my platoon sergeant, my company first sergeant, my battalion commander. All the way up the chain of command, viciously racist terms were suddenly acceptable. (MichaelMoore.com, 12/26/09)

Now that they were no longer considered human, Iraqis became GIs’ targets in sick shooting sprees. It didn’t matter whether the Iraqis were armed or not; for dehumanized soldiers, it became a video game. “Point, Click, Kill,” chanted U.S. officers, according to Prysner. Unfortunately, Prysner, despite his opposition to the war-makers, has chosen the futile path of electoral politics. He ran for Congress for a class-collaborationist socialist party. 

Racism cannot be voted out. Nor can it be separated from capitalism. Racism is the foundation of the profit system that gave it birth and depends on it for its existence. That is why the Progressive Labor Party champions the fight against racism and for multi-racial, working-class unity: It is essential for a communist revolution. We must continue and intensify our fight in the class struggle against the evil of racism in all of our organizations and among all of our friends, co-workers, neighbors and classmates. Only by winning masses to communist politics can we save our class from the profit system’s atrocities and construct a society that meets workers’ needs. Join PLP and help us build this world!

Capitalism Created Racism

Racism, a worldwide phenomenon, owes its creation to the first capitalist imperialists. Five centuries ago, it began with the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the Dutch, British and French, who used the notion of “superior” and “inferior” peoples to justify their colonization and exploitation of the New World. (Later, the capitalists threw in the equally racist concept of meaningless “ethnicity,” as in the British lords’ subjugation of “inferior” Irish workers.) The utterly unscientific concept of different “races,” and the phony hierarchy among them, served the colonizers by falsely justifying the importation of African slave labor to their New World plantations. In turn, the colonizers used slavery to exploit European-born workers in the one-step-away category of indentured servant. To this day, capitalists have continued to super-exploit some groups of workers to enable their exploitation of all.

As the United States ruling class digs in for an indefinite occupation of the Middle East, weighs its options for war against Iran, and expands its presence in East Asia, it faces a major obstacle: the lack of enthusiasm for this future of expanding war among working-class youth. The bosses’ dilemma is the context for the viral spread of the “Kony 2012” video, an attack on a murderous warlord in Central Africa that collected more than 70 million hits on YouTube within days of its release.   

Invisible Children, the organization that created the video, was founded by three former film students at the University of Southern California. They have gained a reputation for profiteering (they’re charging $35 for a Kony 2012 “action kit”) and for on-line “slacktivism,” where social change is supposedly just a mouse click away. They also promote the neocolonialist myth that U.S. do-gooders represent the best hope to cure Central Africa’s ills.

Despite these evident weaknesses, the “Stop Kony” campaign has grown into a dangerous mass phenomenon. Endorsed by celebrities like George Clooney, Rihanna, and Sean “Diddy” Combs, and dovetailing with the needs of U.S. capitalism, it may have the potential to break through cyberspace and spill over into action in the real world — a phenomenon that one blogger called “crowd-sourced internvention.”

An Excuse To Expand Troops in Uganda

In reality, the “Stop Kony” campaign is a carefully crafted call to mobilize young people to support U.S. imperialism in Central Africa. By building public pressure for a stepped-up fight against Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, and in particular for the U.S. to expand its current ranks of military advisers in Uganda, the video is misleading millions of well-meaning viewers. By siding against such an easy target, the vicious and brutal Joseph Kony, Invisible Children prompts people to side with the U.S. capitalist class, its politicians and its armed forces.  

But when it comes to brutality, nobody beats U.S. capitalism. This system was built on the most extensive genocide, slavery, and racism the world has ever seen.  It inspired and then armed fascists from Germany to South Africa to Nicaragua, and in 1945 unleashed a nuclear holocaust on Japan. Today, U.S. capitalism rests on a global system of violence that condemns billions to grinding poverty and premature death.  Workers cannot side with this murderous system.

On April 19, Invisible Children will be organizing an overnight effort to plaster public spaces across the U.S. with “Stop Kony” posters. By showing a profile of the warlord with bin Laden and Hitler in the background, the poster implies that the movement to stop Kony warrants a U.S. invasion. Youth in and around the Progressive Labor Party will work inside this campaign to expose its warmongering essence. We will lead the friends we make there to join us on April 28 for May Day, and to enlist in the only organization that can stop capitalist brutality from Uganda to Brooklyn, the revolutionary communist PLP. 

This is the first of a three-part review of the young adult sci-fi trilogy by Suzanne Collins that made the NY Times best seller list. It is widely being used by high school reading and English teachers and has now been made into a much-anticipated motion picture.

Hunger Games, the first book and also the name of the series, begins at some indeterminate future time after natural disasters, droughts, storms, fires and finally a brutal period of wars have devastated North America. While there are futuristic, sci-fi gimmicks throughout the story, the main characters are very down-to-earth, mostly young adults, from working-class families. The society described is an openly fascist one with many parallels to the current day U.S.

Following the natural disasters, a nation “Panem” was created with a luxurious “Capitol” city of the rich rulers and their allies (somewhere in the Rocky Mountains), surrounded by thirteen districts whose workers and resources are exploited for the profit of the rulers. The districts rebelled but were defeated. District Thirteen was apparently leveled into dust and left abandoned as an example of how futile any acts of revolution would be against the Capitol rulers.

‘Games’ Extreme Version of Capitalist Culture

The rulers also tried to discourage workers’ rebellion by creating a yearly “Hunger Games” in which each district was forced to send a boy and a girl (chosen by lot) between the ages of 12 and 18 to a televised battle to the death where only one child can survive. The Games represent an extreme version of the current capitalist culture’s obsession with “reality” shows where there can be only one winner in survival, love or creative pursuits, or where the lives of working-class young people are exploited for entertainment.

The story begins in District 12 (Appalachia) and is narrated by the 16-year-old heroine, Katniss, who hunts and forages for food to help feed her mother and younger sister. A fiercely independent daughter of a worker who lost his life in a coal mining explosion (coal is what “12” supplies to the capital), Katniss is rebellious but in a very individualistic way. She sees the horror and injustice of the society around her, but is too cynical, for the most part, to unite in struggle with any others but her one friend, Gale, and her family.

When the lottery for the current year’s Hunger Games is held, Katniss’s younger sister “wins” the lottery, but Katniss courageously volunteers to replace her in the Games. Katniss and a boy, Peeta, who once befriended her, are whisked to the Capitol as two of the Games’ 12 gladiators. Mass media manipulation then builds a frenzy of competition (and wagering by the wealthy viewers) to see who will be the one survivor.

Make Alliances to Challenge Rulers 

Some contestants are bloodthirsty and vicious, mimicking the ideas and actions of the rulers, but Katniss is smart and resourceful and learns to make alliances with a few others who challenge the rulers’ game ideology of everyone only for themselves. Peeta, both from social conscience and love, shows he is willing to sacrifice himself so that Katniss can survive. Another young woman, Rue, forms an alliance with Katniss, even though as a 12-year-old with no fighting skills she has little chance of survival.

When Rue is killed, Katniss avenges her death by killing her attacker and surrounds her body in flowers as a protest against the rulers’ games. When the survivors are down to six, Katniss joins forces with Peeta, and the rulers try to take advantage of their “love” alliance (although to Katniss it is a political alliance) by changing the rules and saying that this year two will be allowed to survive. When only Katniss and Peeta have survived, the rules are changed back to only one survivor allowed. Katniss and Peeta refuse to fight each other so that there will be no winner (Katniss estimates that the rulers need to parade a winner to maintain their image in the districts). 

Katniss is a strong anti-sexist character. She is thoughtful (whether we agree with her conclusions or not) and willing to take action, including necessary violence, to fight for what she believes in. Katniss is an honest working-class woman whose ideas develop positively as her experiences expand. There is no passivity or pacifism in her, or really, in the story.

Early in the book, Katniss puts down thinking about history and social conditions because that “doesn’t put food on the table.” Later in the Games, she changes direction and tries to expose the rulers’ manipulations, actions that gain her support from the workers in Rue’s District and which also lead Thresh (the other representative of that District) to save her life. 

There’s no sugarcoating of the oppression in Panem. Starvation is used as a weapon to weaken the working class (hence the irony of the Hunger Games). Fascist violence and death are used to crush rebellions. 

Using Privileges to Maintain Power

In the beginning, Katniss’s friend Gale argues that allowing some workers a little more privilege than others is just a tool for the rulers to set workers against each other. He echoes how today’s capitalist rulers use racism, nationalism and wage differentials to maintain their power. 

The districts can be seen as oppressed by the rulers’ Capitol much as the working class and resources of lesser-developed countries around the world are exploited by the U.S. and other major imperialist powers. While the local rulers installed in some districts (like 12) are on the surface less oppressive than others, the story makes clear — as do the actions of smooth-talking liberals like Obama — that this has little effect on the wars and exploitation that workers face .

Terms such as capitalism, the ruling class or the working class never appear, but it is not hard to show many similarities between Panem and the U.S. today. The ideas in the book are often left vague and there’s no hint of a communist alternative, but this book is a lot more than a Harry Potter fantasy world. 

These books, unlike much of the romantic and senselessly violent trash that our youth are given to read, support the idea that rebellion against injustice is necessary and inevitable. There are real working people and real social conditions in this story, and we in PLP need to engage students, teachers and others to bring forth the ideas of communist revolution as the only alternative that would liberate the workers of Panem.