A cockroach named Dylann Roof pulled the trigger at Emanuel AME Church. But capitalism aimed the gun. Capitalism murdered nine people in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17—nine more victims to add to the millions of workers killed each year by callous starvation, preventable disease, environmental toxins, a profit-crazed pharmaceutical industry, missing medical care, mad-dog police, and imperialist war.
And, in particular, by racism.
The foundation of U.S. capital consists of two centuries of Black enslavement and another century and a half of super-exploitation of Black and Latin and immigrant workers. To justify these super-profits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and protect their organized crime, the capitalist bosses rely on racist ideology. This ranges from the pseudo-science of “intelligence” testing—and the bogus concept of “race” itself—to Barack Obama calling the Baltimore rebels “thugs,” the contemporary n-word. To beat back revolt against their oppressive profit system, the rulers resort to state terror: the mass incarceration and legalized lynching of young Black men and women by the bosses’ cops. (See CHALLENGE, page 4.)
Following Racist Leaders
Dylann Roof was both a product and an instrument of this racist, ruling-class agenda. In his online manifesto, Roof said he was “radicalized” by the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a wannabe cop.
He was influenced by the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, an offshoot of the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and ‘60s that harassed and assaulted  civil rights workers in the South. (Essentially an open version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Citizens Councils’ membership included Congressmen, state legislators, newspaper publishers and editors, and the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.)
Given Roof’s gutter leanings, he was no doubt inspired by the recent onslaught of murders-by-cop, the cold-blooded killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Shantel Davis and too many others to mention. When the bosses’ police and courts declare open season on Black workers and youth, vigilante scum follow their lead.
Sometimes these atrocities are useful to the ruling class. By distorting the events through their corporate media, the capitalists use them to intimidate workers and feed racist stereotypes. They can try to turn us against one another. They know the one force that can destroy them is a unified, multiracial working class with revolutionary communist leadership. Without racism to divide the world’s workers, there aren’t enough bombs in the world to keep the bosses afloat—or alive.
Terrorists, Big and Small
But sometimes the little terrorists go too far. Sometimes they threaten the rulers’ overriding strategy to recruit enough reliable soldiers for the next big war over Middle Eastern oil, against Russia or China or both. Then the big terrorists slap the little ones down, in a desperate attempt to retain workers’ allegiance and hold open rebellion at bay.
That’s what happened in Ferguson, when the U.S. Attorney General rushed to the scene and launched a civil rights investigation. It happened in Baltimore, when the injustice system was compelled to indict six cops after the brutal in-custody execution of Freddie Gray. It just happened again in Charleston, when politicians of both parties and all stripes joined the liberal national media in condemning Roof and declaring that the Confederate battle flag must go.
In a time of intense partisanship and ruling-class dysfunction, the dominant finance capital wing has used the Charleston massacre to unite and discipline its ranks. News of campaign donations from the Council of Conservative Citizens discredited three Republicans presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum. All are close allies of Charles and David Koch, the Kansas billionaires with huge investments in the domestic U.S. oil industry—and little interest in going to a war to defend ExxonMobil’s profits in Iraq or Saudi Arabia. The three candidates were exposed because the biggest U.S. bosses—represented by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Jeb Bush, among others—don’t trust their leadership in the next global conflict.
Workers Have But One Flag
The Confederate flag is an abomination. It stands for slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the most brutal, unspeakable oppression of men, women, and children. It should be shredded and burned wherever it is found. But the Confederacy had nothing to do with the genocidal slaughter of millions of people in the Vietnam War, or the half a million children killed by U.S. sanctions against Iraq, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians incinerated by atomic bombs in World War II. These genocidal crimes were committed by the side that won the Civil War, by finance capital, under the most feared and despicable banner in the world today: the U.S. flag.
Workers have no nation. National flags can lead them only in the wrong direction. Flags fuel conflict among workers wherever capitalists are at odds: in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in Israel and Palestine. The international working class has only one flag—the red flag of communist revolution. The Progressive Labor Party has carried that flag for fifty years in our fight against racist terror and for a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs. We hold the red flag high in two dozen countries. Join us!