NEWARK, NJ, July 26—As a group of multiracial workers rallied outside the Veterans Courthouse on MLK Blvd., Monique Rodwell, the mother of the Rodwell-Spivey Brothers, texted the Rodwell Spivey Defense Team group chat. “Come up guys, they agreed to release him.”

After a year and two months of being detained and punished in one of the most dehumanizing ways on earth, the City of Newark’s prosecutor’s office temporarily set down its whip to release Justin Rodwell from jail. Our defense team of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends have rallied around the Rodwell-Spivey family from the beginning in support of their decision to unite against police terror and in defense of every worker ever put under the boot of this racist, capitalist system. One of the first things our defense team did was invite the family to attend a kickoff to the PLP 2022 Summer Project, and now this year, we’re fighting side by side with a stronger relationship and more lessons learned.

Although the defense team called to ‘FREE JUSTIN,’ as long as capitalism rages on, no worker could ever be free. Not only does this system thrive on exploitation of our class—and the super-exploitation of Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant, and women workers—it also strips workers of our humanity through police terror and mass incarceration. Both are just another form of roping workers into wage slavery.

On June 1, 2021, the Rodwell-Spivey brothers were roped into the system's clutches when two undercover kkkops pulled up on and assaulted Jaykil (Supreme) Rodwell and Jasper (Kick) Spivey as they were talking with a street vendor outside of their house. Their brothers, Justin Rodwell, Branden (Bam) Rodwell, and neighbors came running to their defense. Kkkops called on their klan-in-blue for backup. A truckload of cops, from undercovers to suits, accosted and arrested all four of them. Bam, arrested the most aggressively, was tossed to the ground when he verbally refused to be arrested from behind. 

Smash mass incarceration
After discovering that one of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers’ public defenders was an ex-cop who was fired for planting drugs on someone, we spread the word like wildfire that we needed to fundraise for another lawyer. We shared the body camera footage with students from Essex County to Kingsborough College, started (and still run) social media pages, sent emails, and made calls to as many people as we knew. It helped exponentially that the story went viral on Twitter. For months we petitioned outside of a Home Depot, grocery stores, and on the ‘number blocks’ in Newark about the terror Black and Latin workers in the area face. Black workers shared their experiences about being roughed up by the cops, robbed, and duped to take pleas and sit in jail for years. On the day of the most recent trial, one man heard our speeches and chants outside the courthouse and ended up spending the day with us, telling us about how he was recently released from Northern State Prison and could tell the courts were trying to railroad the family over like they did him and countless others affected by mass incarceration.

Nearly 50 of us packed the court and showed proof that the eyes of the working class are on this case. With the sharp strategy of our collective, we were able to build our lives around the family and use a huge political event for our base to highlight these racist courts and pack them with an intergenerational, multiracial group of fighters. It was a lesson and a reminder that this system will never favor our class, from Newark to Colombia. In cahoots with racist public school administrations, politicians, welfare systems, and police, judges and court-appointed bailiffs exist to penalize and lock workers up as soon as we step out of line (see previous CHALLENGE issue). And to these historically racist courts and prosecutors' offices’ dismay, the Rodwell-Spivey family will not go at this harassment and terror alone. As long as anti-racist workers under this system can fight back, no worker will ever be alone.

Released, but not free
Justin may have been released, but that does not mean he is free. Justin and his brothers face prison time, with Justin facing the harshest penalty: forty-three years with no possibility of parole. All because he and his brothers dared to fight the police. As Justin, the Rodwell-Spivey family, and countless others in Newark still battle for housing, peace without police, and economic stability, the fight is far from over! Being targeted and harassed by these institutions under capitalism is an economic and emotional tax on our class. As the U.S. Marshals service functions, ‘Operation Essex Thunder,’ “the District of New Jersey and the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force once again used their multi-jurisdictional investigative authority” to target and arrest 34 Black workers in June (usmarshals.gov, 6/17).

With two liberal Black mayors, Newark’s Mayor Baraka and NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in office, this is fascism or betrayal and institutional stomping out of the working class by so-called liberals. On the heels of another week-long water crisis with a break in Newark’s water mainline, Baraka led a ‘Peace March’ and, in his speech, blamed parents of incarcerated workers for eruptions of gun violence in the city. But what Baraka and Adams will never say is that they represent the largest gang known to man, the United States government, and are sweeping up the pieces of the failings of bosses before them, all while blaming the workers for their complacency in the exploitation of our labor. But for their reign to live on, they must punish one working-class sector while pretending to serve their more loyal base of workers.

The only way to grant our class a true victory against this system is a full communist revolution. To get there, we need to actualize the potential of what we as workers can do as an armed mass movement, not by swearing into electoral politics and anti-working class rhetoric year after year. Many of us need to participate in antiracist struggles like these because struggle and fightback are the only way that we build and learn how to fight for a communist world where racist courts, judges, and prisons cease to exist. No amount of police accountability or bail reforms will work when it is the system itself that is rotten.

Next steps in the ring of fightback
Our next steps include petitioning and flyering throughout Newark and celebrating Justin’s release on September 9 on the block where it all happened. Although Justin is released, this system fails Black and Latin workers like Justin and the Rodwell-Spivey brothers en masse. And reforms like the decision to end cash bail reform in NJ only adapt the chains around our class’ necks. Justin is open to our politics and agrees that racist mayors and overseers like COs and street officers only look out for themselves and their capitalist bosses. Also, both phony politics of having identity-based representation and reform failed his family and will fail workers worldwide without an international working class revolution. Even when we are released from one form of terror, without communism, we will never be free!