KENOSHA, WISCONSIN, August 26—When police fired seven shots into Jacob Blake in the back while his three children watched, workers and youth in Kenosha erupted in rebellion. As they should.
U.S. capitalism’s defenders, the police, have once again proven themselves to be a terrorist force that must be abolished. To do so, the rebels need communist politics and revolution.
Some antiracists, including Progressive Labor Party, have learned from the protests that rumbled in every U.S. city following the recent police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. One such lesson is that nothing scares the rulers more than multiracial unity and Black leadership from the working class. As CHALLENGE goes to press, PLP is bringing solidarity to the bold Kenosha fighters (see next issue).
Jacob Blake’s Kenosha
Seven-and-a-half year veteran cop Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob. The other bad cop that aided in this attempted murder was Luke Courtier, a cop known for posting, “It was a good shot” about the 2014 police murder-by-14-shots of Dontre Hamilton, a Black man with schizophrenia. The racist kkkops paralyzed Jacob from the waist down after one of the seven bullets severed his spinal cord, shattered some of his vertebrae, and damaged his stomach, kidneys, and liver. The racist trauma these police caused to Jacob, his family, and children is unforgivable.
Jacob’s family has a pro-working class history; his grandfather was a pastor who fought for fair housing in the 1960s and 1970s. When they moved to Kenosha, it was to start over. Kenosha was an auto-manufacturing center for a century until the capitalist crisis led workers to lose their livelihoods. As of 2019, nearly 20 percent of workers live in official poverty. Police chief Daniel Miskinis’s goons are known for drawing guns for something as small as a routine traffic stop. Routine systemic racism and the decay of U.S. capitalism seem to be on full display in this city.
Two repulsive ruling class responses
The Small Fascist Republicans are openly appealing to racist police terror and Klan-type vigilantism, an ideology that led a white 17-year-old, Kyle Howard Rittenhouse, to shoot and kill protesters in Kenosha with a rifle. A country that alienates Black, Latin, and immigrant workers has little chance in galvanizing those same people to defend U.S. imperialism against rivals like China (see page 4). This is the motivation behind the Big Fascists’ response.
The Big Fascists, the main finance capitalists of the ruling class, wasted no time in co-opting protests and sending out their apologists. Opportunist Al Sharpton spoke with Jacob’s father, who will now speak at Sharpton's March on Washington commemoration on Friday. Liberal Joe Biden, hoping to be elected president in two months, said the police shots “pierce the soul of our nation.” This is the same man who wrote the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that intensified the war on Black and Latin workers. This is just one of several laws that Biden helped write and sponsor (Vox, 6/20) that led to the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration. As a new senator, he had also worked with segregationist politicians to attack the integration efforts via school busing. So much for liberals being the lesser evil.  
The state is violent
The bosses’ media condemn what they called “a riot.” Meanwhile, anyone with eyes has been witnessing the systematic violence of the Klan-in-blue. As youth and workers risked their health and lives in a pandemic to protest racist police murder, the bosses doubled down with more fascist terror.
The Democratic mayor, John Antaramian, installed a curfew and called on 125 soldiers from the National Guard, the military reserve force, to defend private property and the government. The police terrorized protesters with teargas and rubber bullets. This terror is not reformable; the origins of police go back to the hunters of enslaved Black people fighting for their freedom in the South and the terrorists to “dangerous” European immigrant workers in the North. Their role has not changed.
The truth is that the biggest instrument of violence, worldwide, is the bosses’ state: their government, military forces, cops, courts, schools, and media. The capitalists murder millions every year through imperialist war, mass unemployment, deplorable health care, unaffordable housing, and the profit-driven poisoning of our air, water, and food. U.S. capitalism in particular was born out of the most violent looting of all: millions of workers and children from Africa were stolen and enslaved.
Rage led protesters to damage the symbols of daily oppression under capitalism: a kkkop car, courthouse, and commercial buildings. Of course, individual and spontaneous violence won’t get workers what we need. Real and lasting change requires something more: organized mass violence to seize state power and make a new society run by and for the working class. You need an international communist party for that.
Black leadership with multiracial unity
The rebellions have proved yet again that Black workers are key to any real change and revolution. Our experience positions us to suffer the most under capitalism while having nothing to lose but our chains. The instincts of rebels are calling on the hundreds of years of revolts and fightbacks against slavery, racism, and imperialism.
The potential of the working class, when realized, has the power to build a new society from the ashes of this dying one. For that, we need all workers—Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous, immigrant, white—to reject every aspect of this inherently unequal system and its traps of electoral politics. Join PLP’s movement for a lifetime of antiracism as we pave the path to communist revolution.