CHICAGO, October 24—The Chicago ruling class escaped a potential working-class rebellion by convicting racist killer cop Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder and aggravated battery on October 5. But even though Van Dyke pulled the trigger, firing the 16 shots that murdered 17-year-old Black teenager LaQuan McDonald, the entire racist capitalist system bears the chief blame for murdering working-class people all over the world every day.
This will remain the brutal reality until the international working class led by the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) rises up in armed mass revolution to crush the capitalist bosses, their state, and their killer cops. True justice for LaQuan and all victims of capitalist state violence means communist revolution!
The whole capitalist state is guilty as hell
The verdict handed down by the jury was not even a slap on the hand of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) whose history of racist terror, torture and murder of Black and Latin workers can be traced back for decades, and the CPD are by no means the only culprits. When we in PLP say that “capitalism killed LaQuan,” we mean that this racist system began failing him at a very young age and Van Dyke was the final blow.
LaQuan was a ward of the State. He was assigned to the unfortunate care of the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), a system so guilty it should be convicted of murder itself. LaQuan was in and out of residential treatment centers, where youth are vulnerable to assault, rape, and prostitution and where there are no counselors, or other professionals that will provide services to this neediest population (Chicago Tribune, 12/3/14).  The education system also is guilty of violence against working-class youth. LaQuan had diagnosed learning and mental health disabilities. However, Chicago Public Schools has schemed to make huge cuts in special education resources to students just like him for years (The Gate, 5/8/). Consequently, LaQuan’s school years were riddled with truancy, expulsions, and, suspensions. He was arrested 26 times since his 13th birthday and in and out of juvenile detention centers for the last three years of his life.
All “justice” fleeting under capitalism
While some might regard this conviction as a victory, it is not! The jury did not give Van Dyke first-degree murder, which is a life sentence without parole. This racist kkkop was acquitted of his charge of “official misconduct,” effectively saying that it is completely appropriate for cops on the job to empty an entire clip into a Black teen.Think what would have happened if LaQuan had shot a cop 16 times!
The racist Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the same cop union that gave Van Dyke a janitorial job after he was fired from CPD, has backed him tooth and nail. To this end, they have vowed to appeal the verdict (WTTW, 10/5). Sentencing will not happen until October 31 and the capitalist press is already talking about Van Dyke receiving the minimum sentence for each count and running the sentences for all counts concurrently, so that he could potentially walk free in as little as six years.
PLP calls on workers to join the Red Army
PLP members and friends held a rally at a train station on the south side of Chicago a few hours after the verdict was read. Many workers were still pissed about the murder of LaQuan, the verdict and the racism that persists in this part of the city. One young man told us about his brother who was unarmed and murdered by CPD two years after LaQuan was murdered, and that there was “never any justice when the police keep killing us.”
We called on workers to join the Red Army that PLP is building so that we can overthrow this murderous system once and for all. Over 300 workers took our newspaper CHALLENGE and hundreds more took leaflets calling for communist revolution. Workers in their cars honked in support of our signs and speeches. The misleaders of the city have been calling for “peace” ever since the tape of Van Dyke murdering LaQuan was released in 2015. PLP calls on all workers to fight back when the system attacks our class. That message of fight back and rebellion was met with enthusiasm on the south side.
Rebellions are training grounds for our class to prepare to take state power away from the capitalist bosses. Rebellions also force the capitalist class to grant reformist concessions that they normally wouldn’t want to surrender to the working class such as the “right” to vote, and social security and unemployment benefits. After the 1967 Detroit rebellion, Black workers were granted access to thousands of auto industry jobs that had been closed to the Black working class. If workers in Russia had not rebelled in 1917 and eventually taken state power from the ruling class, the Nazis probably would have won World War II.
As we made speeches connecting the murder of LaQuan to mass racist unemployment, to the racist closing of 52 schools in mainly Black and Latin communities, and to the violent gentrification happening in Chicago an older Black woman said, “They (racist capitalists) only understand one thing, that’s an ass-whoopin.” It is the role of PLP to harness and organize working class anger into a fighting force that can deliver that final “ass-whoopin” to the capitalist class all over the world.