In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew exposes the broad, coordinated nature of the U.S. gutter racist and fascist “white power” movement and its responsibility for many killings by so-called “lone wolves.” The white supremacist movement itself is a loose collection of many racist, nationalist and anti-communist groups from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to neo-Nazis to militias and is a part of how U.S. capitalism maintains control over the working class through racism.
Federal agencies in the U.S. have long known of the white supremacist movement’s mass base, but they have not responded proportionately. Although Belew sees violent fascism as a consequence of a violent U.S. foreign policy, she does not consider that the growth of extreme racism is useful to the ruling class or contrast their undersized response with the aggressive targeting of foreign-inspired terrorism and antiracists.
She also does not discuss anti-racist opposition to white supremacists, much of which has been led by the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for decades all over the country. Communists fight to unite the entire working class to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system and build a communist world, run by the international working class. This proudly makes the communist PLP the sworn enemy of racists everywhere!
History of white supremacists
While gutter racist mass movements have been nurtured by the U.S. ruling class since the 1860s U.S. Civil War, the latest surge in racist activism began after the 1960s Vietnam War. Some veterans resented racial integration in the army and bought the U.S. government lies about fighting communism. The post-Vietnam racists built paramilitary camps in nine states and launched many attacks, while suffering few arrests or convictions. In 1979, they killed five leftist anti-KKK demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina, while the cops did nothing. Belew attributes this only to poor command and miscommunications.
By 1993, white supremacist groups unified and started getting out of the U.S. government’s control, declaring their goal of eventually seizing the government for themselves. They began to counterfeit and steal money and encouraged attacks on infrastructure and the assassination of federal agents and judges. Tactically, they developed a terrorist model of small leaderless cells of one to five persons, with communications through print media and the internet.
When the increasingly militarized U.S. police of the 90s attacked two white supremacist centers with tactics previously limited to poor Black communities, and killed women and children, the racists had another surge in membership. One recruit was a terrorist named Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people. Belew fails to consider that extreme racism has a value in this nation birthed in slavery and still home to massive racial discrimination.
The U.S. depends on racism to keep workers divided and save trillions on lower wages and social spending in non-white communities, which in turn lowers standards for all workers. Not only do these extremists help keep racist ideas and practices alive, but they allow the more liberal politicians to be mildly critical and so appear less racist themselves. And, while the history presented by Belew is important, the author fails to contrast this picture of a growing white supremacist movement only occasionally facing police opposition with the intense police efforts to infiltrate and control antiracist and leftist organizing.
In 1967, the FBI Counterintelligence Program began COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE, which focused on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and many antiracist groups with Black workers. The FBI’s Ghetto Informant Program disrupted or discredited similar antiracist organizations, and similar programs still exist today.
What of the antiracist opposition?
There have been many instances of successful antiracist actions against white supremacist groups, many led by PLP. Throughout the 1970s until today, among many confrontations, PLP has invaded the Nazi headquarters in Chicago, disrupted racist radio broadcasts in Kansas City and KKK demonstrations in Texas. We smashed the Klan in Boston, stood up against armed Klansmen in Mississippi, and infiltrated and attacked the racists in downtown New York City and Morristown, New Jersey, among a proud and militant history of other actions. Klan leader Bill Wilkerson even declared in the 1980s that PLP was the main barrier they faced in building their movement.
Yet if law enforcement is present at white supremacist events, those injured or arrested are more likely to be antiracists than racists. This was the case in 2016, when PLP demonstrators were injured and arrested in Anaheim, California while knife-wielding racists went free. In 2017, a massive group of racists was met by an even larger group of protestors in Charlottesville, and the police did little. One racist was convicted later for killing a white woman anti-racist, an act too despicable to be ignored.
The ruling class needs racists
Although the fascist right accounts for 73 percent of extremist murders, they are rarely labeled hate crimes or terrorism; unlike how the racist capitalist media regularly portrays Muslim workers. Trump has rescinded grants to organizations countering white supremacy, and the Department of Homeland Security has disbanded its analyst group on domestic terrorism.
Now that the U.S. is closer to fascism, the President can openly embrace racist thugs. Even if liberal Democrats win the presidency in 2020, the history of all politicians, even Black ones, should not give us hope that violent racists will be made to account. Only by building multiracial relationships and struggles ourselves and vigorously opposing the ideas and actions of white supremacy and nationalism can we defeat racist divisions and violence. Only by making a communist revolution can we guarantee that racism will be eliminated once and for all!
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Rising fascism against immigrant workers—SMASH ALL BORDERS
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- 30 June 2019 72 hits
Mexico has deployed 15,000 soldiers and National Guardsmen to the U.S.-Mexico border. Immigrant workers, displaced by the misery and violence generated by capitalism, are caught in the raging battles between ruling-class factions across the globe.
Just as rivers of raw materials and goods flow from one end of the world to the other, so the workforce of millions of migrants flows. The communists of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) believe that the working class has no borders. In unity with the international working class, we are fighting back against racism, nationalism, and the bosses’ brutal attacks on migrant workers.
Wretched conditions
Migrant workers and families have increasingly organized in caravans of thousands of people, including entire families, to try to reach the U.S. and cross illegally or request political asylum. They do this to protect themselves. Even under the harshest conditions, the working class organizes to defend itself.
As countless workers in Mexico and Central America attempt this journey to hell, they are faced with terrible choices. They can pay a pollero to smuggle them over the border. Or they can attempt it on their own and risk extortion by the police, army, criminal cartels, and the ICE police. Many women are raped or forced into sex or domestic work; other men and women are enslaved on farms.
The border crossers have found support from workers in Mexico, mainly women from the neighborhoods surrounding the trains, who have organized to give food and accommodations to their class. Dozens of these support stations have been set up along the route. These actions reflect the spirit of solidarity of the working class and show the potential of our class to build a communist society freed from the enslavement of the bosses.
To liberate ourselves, this ember of class unity must be fanned into the flame of class consciousness. It must become a mass communist movement to fight against the source of all exploitation and misery, the capitalist system.
Trump’s gutter racism builds on Obama’s legacy
Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant administration, representing the isolationist Fortress America faction of domestically oriented U.S. bosses, uses open racism to mobilize its political base. It blames workers coming from Central America for the problems caused by capitalism. It has tightened measures to prevent workers crossing the U.S.-Mexican border from remaining in the U.S. while they wait months for their asylum hearings. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened Mexico with a trade war to force the Mexican ruling class to implement measures to stop or reduce the flow of workers from Central America (The Guardian, 6/20).
The U.S. Democratic Party liberal politicians, who represent the finance capital main wing of the U.S. ruling class, are using the suffering of the migrant workers for their own cynical purposes. They are mobilizing anti-racist workers against the liberals’ internal capitalist rivals, represented by Trump and the Republican Party. The liberal bosses, under growing pressure from the rising Chinese ruling class, hope that we’ll forget that it was Barack Obama who authorized the building of the concentration camps at the border. It was the Big Fascist liberals who showed the Little Fascists, now running the White House and Senate, how to jail the children of the working class in the same prison camps once used to intern workers of Japanese descent during World War II. Just five years ago, “Oklahoma’s Fort Sill was used as a detention facility for migrant children under President Barack Obama” (Newsweek, 6/13).
AMLO exposed as liberal danger
Likewise, the dominant finance capital bosses in Mexico are showing the horrors that liberals have in store for the working class—a danger even greater than the program of the likes of Trump. The government of Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is sending 6,000 soldiers from the recently created National Guard to the border with Guatemala to harass and arrest workers in the caravans. Transport companies will now demand official identification. The new attacks represent a move towards fascist control of the population. On June 14, in the state of Vera Cruz, a group of workers from El Salvador was fired on by Mexican police, who killed a 19-year-old woman (Washington Post, 6/19).
The military buildup at Mexico’s southern border will only increase the attacks on migrant workers. It also exposes the true nature of the liberal faction of the Mexican ruling class. While López Obrador speaks of investment projects for southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to benefit the working class (The Hill 12/18/18), he is making clear to his capitalist masters that he will do whatever it takes to preserve the exploitative capitalist system. The capitalist bosses need AMLO to build a fascist state that terrorizes, jails, and kills migrant workers. If he wants to stay in power, he’ll comply.
Ultimately, many of these terrorized workers will be forced into a low-wage labor force that the U.S. liberal imperialists and Mexican bosses will exploit together, a part of their decades-long plan to build an industrial and freight transport corridor between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Splits and rising fascism
In this period of internationally rising fascism, where a global war between the big imperialists looms on the horizon, the liberal bosses pose the greatest threat to our class as they desperately try to hold on to their power through intensified terror and violence. Parties like AMLO’s MORENA in Mexico and the Democrats in the U.S. are the spearhead of a movement to take down their enemies in the ruling class—and then go after our class even more viciously, once they have consolidated their power and are moving toward bigger wars.
Regardless of which party may be in power, capitalism has consistently failed the workers of Mexico. “[O]ne out of four Mexican municipalities has living conditions similar to sub-Saharan Africa in terms of illiteracy, access to healthcare, and homes without toilets or solid floors (Business Insider 8/2/15). AMLO and Mexico’s liberal bosses are banking on state terror to get workers to accept even worse conditions, lower salaries, and longer workdays. Their rival Mexican rulers, as in the U.S. and Europe, are small-time fascist bosses who mobilize poor workers to their side through open racism. Right-wing politicians and capitalists have already begun to attack the migrants and to question what little support the migrants receive from the government.
But if the bosses are counting on a passive working class, they’re in for a surprise. Workers always fight back. The next step is to unite in the struggle for communist revolution. Communists fight to build a world without borders. Join us!
While the capitalists created borders (see page 2), Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always organized solidarity across them, in defiance of them, and will one day abolish them once and for all. Here, we look at the Party’s championing of internationalism. Our 54-year-long fight against these deadly borders contains the seeds of a communist alternative worthy of our working-class sisters and brothers.
Communist internationalism
PLP has advanced the tradition of communist internationalism that began with the First International and the Paris Commune of 1871. We have carried the torch of internationalism to its logical and necessary conclusion: one world, one class, one Party fighting directly for communism. No retreats along nationalist lines!
PLP is an international communist party because the working class is one class everywhere, with a universal class interest. Since workers produce everything of value, we can collectively determine how to share it according to need. We don’t need bosses, a class that steals most of that value through wage slavery. We stand for the abolition of capitalism; we fight to eliminate racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Our internationalism means working-class unity that follows the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
It means a united working class led by one mass, international Party containing hundreds of millions of communist workers. We reject the call by various national “communist” parties for nationalist “roads to socialism.” This formulation is drawn from capitalist-created countries that divide the international working class and negate its universal class character.
Unlike the old communist movement, PLP does not separate along nationalist lines. Though our circumstances and tactics may differ in the U.S. and East Africa, our political line for communist revolution is the same everywhere. We oppose nationalism, which leads to workers uniting behind “their” capitalist bosses and fighting “foreign” or immigrant workers. The concept of two opposing, worldwide classes — workers against bosses — is fundamental to destroying capitalism and establishing communism.
PLP grows worldwide
The following are just some of the struggles that reflect the Party’s internationalist practice:
In 1964, in solidarity with the workers and youth of Vietnam, PLP formed the May 2nd Movement to oppose the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam. We organized the first mass demonstration against the war under the slogan, “U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Vietnam!” This slogan eventually was adopted by millions, challenging the calls by liberals and phony leftists to “Stop the Bombing” and “Negotiate,” neither of which indicted U.S. imperialism (see CHALLENGE, 8/12/15).
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, PL’ers joined the military to win soldiers to refuse to kill their sisters and brothers in Vietnam and instead to turn the guns against the U.S. ruling class.
During the 1984-85 British miners’ strike, PLP organized support campaigns, bringing miners to the U.S. to speak at rallies and on campuses. They exposed the brutal policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who ordered police attacks on strikers and laid off tens of thousands.
In El Salvador, PLP recruited from among former fighters for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, after the FMLN became an electoral party that betrayed the revolution.
In Palestine-Israel, PLP joined mass demonstrations against Israeli rulers’ demolition of Palestinian villages. We fought sub-standard wages enforced by slave traders and exposed the rulers’ racism perpetrated against immigrants from Africa.
In Mexico, PLP members in the teachers’ union fought government attacks to break their strikes and cripple the schools through privatization.
In East Africa, PLP is organizing among students and teachers and waging anti-sexist struggles.
In Colombia, PLP mobilized striking workers, from refrigerator factories to beer factories. PLP’s revolutionary line was so threatening to revisionists [fake leftists] and bosses alike that death threats to our comrades were common.
In Haiti, we grew from a club of trade unionists and students to one embedding itself into the agricultural working class. PLP fought against MINUSTAH, the UN occupation force that triggered the spread of cholera, as well as racist deportations and inadequate sewage and plumbing systems.
In Pakistan, PL’ers organized aid for workers devastated by an earthquake, while the government abandoned the victims. We are fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses’ attacks, especially on super-exploited women working in subhuman conditions and earning little or no pay.
With the advent of U.S. imperialist assaults on the working class in Afghanistan and Iraq, PL launched campaigns attacking the murders of millions by U.S. rulers, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Pickets were organized at embassies in U.S. cities. PL’ers enlisted in the military to spread the Party’s ideas among soldiers in Iraq and to oppose attacks on working-class families there.
Spreading solidarity and ideology
PLP has organized international solidarity for local struggles. Comrades in Haiti wrote letters of solidarity to City University of New York students during the campaign to oust war criminal David Petraeus from campus. In Brooklyn, PLP rallied in immigrant neighborhoods in response to racist deportations in the Dominican Republic. Word of PLP’s actions and communist ideology have spread across the world, both through immigrant workers from Latin America and through CHALLENGE on the internet.
Today, CHALLENGE is printed in English, Spanish, French, Creole, Arabic, Hebrew, Dari, Urdu, and more.
One class, one fight for communism
The world we fight for is one where workers’ power will reign supreme. A communist world will wipe out borders created by the bosses to reap more profits from exploiting those they call “foreigners.” It will eradicate imperialist wars, which the rulers launch to grab resources and cheap labor. In a communist world, there will be no foreigners, no “illegal” migrants, no refugees from war or poverty.
While the reformists continue to fragment themselves with the identity politics of race, gender, sexuality, or national loyalties, PLP unites ALL workers, based on class-consciousness. Over the last 54 years, our staunch internationalism made has helped us grow from an organization with a handful of workers in New York to a Party that spans 27 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe. That is no small victory! Forward to another 50 years of communist organizing that puts the international working class above the individual.
Workers in Senegal have the same interest as workers in China or Chile or the U.S.: a society that will meet their class’s needs. An egalitarian, communist world. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for yourselves, for your children and for future generations.
We have a Party to organize and a world to win!
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Shantel’s 7-year anniversary: Black leadership key to revolution
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- 30 June 2019 75 hits
Brooklyn, June 14 - “How do you spell RACIST? N-Y-P-D!!!” This uncompromising chant was shouted in defiance by a determined band of anti-racist fighters who rallied and blocked traffic in memory of Shantel Davis, murdered by killer kkkop ‘Bad Boy’ Phillip Atkins seven years ago today.
A blue-shirted ‘community affairs’ cop attempted to rush a solemn release of balloons in memory of Shantel and anger exploded among families, who had members killed by cops. The cops interference only served to prolong our occupation of the street. Carloads of plainclothes assassins like the one who shot Shantel swarmed the scene. No arrests were made, as the show of fascist strength was matched by the strength of multi-racial working class unity with communist politics in the lead.
Though Public Advocate Jumaane Williams (the #2 figure in New York City government under Mayor Bill de Blasio) was present, Shantel’s sister asked a Progressive Labor Party member to give the opening speech. Jumaane has been in our protests from the start, but has delivered little. Here is the PLP speech:
Like so many other families who have survived racist cop murder, the one thing Shantel’s sister wants is for no other family to have to suffer the loss she has faced. But this is the one thing that no elected official can promise. In fact, just nine months after Shantel was killed by Atkins, Kimani Gray, 16, was killed by cops working out of the same Flatbush precinct, the 67.
Atkins had a record of settlements against him well into six figures at the time he murdered Shantel. The city paid out damages because he had a track record of being brutal. But he was kept on the streets. In fact, the city knows who are their most brutal cops, because they pay out the money in damages when complaints are filed. Yet the ruling class keeps these cops on the force no matter who the mayor is. Elections do not change that. And so any leader who tells you that an election can give Shantel’s sister, and all the other grieving families, a system where racist cop murder won’t happen again is a liar and a misleader. In fact the youth rebellion that erupted after Kimani was killed, or the rebellion that just hit Memphis,over another police killing of a Black man, are closer to what it is going to take to end racist cop murder than any election could ever be.
This misleaders’ strategy of elections will only get more intense as we approach the 2020 election. But just like liberals want us to live with racist cop murder, they will hide their march to World War III behind the cover of being anti-Trump.
These families have suffered a loss the rest of us can’t imagine. We need to trust their leadership to continue the struggle through the emotional ups and downs of life without their loved ones, not the misleadership of those who point us to elections as an answer. It’s going to take a revolution and a communist world for us to have the society that will deliver on the promise of making racist cop murder a thing of the past.
Another speaker called for multiracial unity and a rejection of the kind of identity politics that would make Shantel’s murder a ‘Black issue’ or a ‘women’s issue.’ Her call for working class solidarity was loud and clear.
When mis-leader Jumaane spoke there was little left for him to say. He said that it is true he could never deliver on a promise that any racist cop murder would be the last. That it was true that the most important leaders are un-elected, even that capitalism was no good and that he hoped to be ‘with us’ in a revolution, but that for now we had to use the tools of the system, like we use money every day, and vote.
This is why liberal politicians are the most dangerous: because they will say whatever it takes – including that they want a revolution – to get us to live with capitalism’s inevitable and necessary attacks on our class. This is how we must understand Sanders’ call for a ‘political revolution’ and who ever else emerges as the anti-Trump in 2020 – they want us to live with what is killing us, capitalism. We will have to kill their influence over the workers in order to kill capitalism.
For a short time on the seventh anniversary of Shantel’s death, on one street corner in Flatbush, in the face of a disproportionate police presence, the multi-racial, intergenerational working class, with bold leadership from Black workers and communists, achieved the kind of political victory that will bring us closer to the classless society that will not only forever abolish racist cop murder, but also the very concept of race.
CHICAGO, June 24 – Working-class Latin immigrant mothers and their supporters continued their struggle against the racist Chicago Public Schools (CPS) today. In the face of tricks and obstacles, the mothers persisted on having a meeting with newly-appointed board president Miguel del Valle regarding the application of magnet status for their children’s dual-language elementary school.
This struggle to re-designate the school as a magnet school is the latest in a long string of battles that these working-class parents have waged against the racist CPS for the district’s attacks on their school and majority-Latin community. Comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been involved in many of these fights and continue to advocate for communist revolution as the only way to guarantee the best education for workers and their children worldwide.
Don’t back down
The meeting with del Valle today was set weeks ahead of time, confirmed through a series of emails exchanged with a PLP comrade and del Valle’s secretary. When we arrived at the president’s luxurious downtown office, however, the receptionist as well as a pair of CPS lackeys began to give us the runaround.
The lackeys first informed us that del Valle was not available, and that the plan was that on this day we would meet with other CPS representatives instead. After we showed these flunkies the email confirmations that we received that we had in fact scheduled the appointment with him specifically, the story changed into how his secretary had since sent cancellation emails to the comrade (which were unsurprisingly never found). It became obvious that CPS was really trying to get out of any obligation to meet with the mothers.
But we were not about to be moved. The mothers as well as the school principal were persistent and pushed back, continuing to show the emails until the CPS flunkies ushered us into a boardroom where del Valle and a handful of other executives magically appeared.
Capitalism fails the working class
Now that we had the CPS bosses’ attention, we were able to pressure them for answers about the status of the application to convert Whittier Elementary into the only dual-language magnet school on the city’s south side.
The school is situated in what is still a majority Latin immigrant working-class neighborhood but which is rapidly gentrifying. Whittier is operating at a little more than half of its enrollment capacity, as more working-class families are displaced by rising rent prices.
By converting the school into a magnet school, by the parents and staff hope to draw in more working-class students who can benefit from the dual Spanish-English program, increase enrollment, and fight off the threat of the school closing in the not-too-distant future.
The application was submitted back in October of 2018, and the parents have faced a lot of racist and sexist indifference from CPS. The application was quickly denied by the district, without explanation. What’s more, the parents who have attended CPS board meetings to bring attention to the school have been made to wait for hours on end to speak. Practically all the mothers involved only speak Spanish, but were offered no translation services from CPS for one of these meetings in April in order to understand what was being discussed.
Today, the immigrant working-class mothers gave testimony on the strengths of the community-centered school and the benefits it has had for the students. One Latin mother, who was forced to move to another neighborhood to the southwest, spoke about how she still drives two of her children to attend Whittier each morning because of the positive impact it has had on their education and language skills.
The CPS bosses faked sincerity and promised to get back to us with updates and a decision in the upcoming weeks. Del Valle and Lori Lightfoot, the new mayor who appointed him, are painting themselves as progressives who are ready to defend education for working-class students. In fact, we need to see these liberals as the main danger to the working class.
Look back no further than past liberal mayor Rahm Emanuel, who championed progressive causes during his campaign and then closed fifty schools, the majority of which were in Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods. A number of his CPS appointees were charged with incompetence and corruption, including former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett.
As long as capitalism treats education as a commodity and working-class students as criminals and future soldiers to be mobilized for war, we can expect more of the same. A communist education is the only one really worth fighting for, where education is not based on money or profits but is a collective, lifelong process grounded in the needs of our class.
Remember La Casita
As we were leaving the CPS office, a comrade told the bosses, “I’m not sure what your decision will be, but I’ve known these parents for many years, and I know that they’re fighters. If you cross them, you’ll have another La Casita on your hands.”
The comrade was referring to the struggle over a community center at Whittier Elementary, which immigrant workers occupied for over a month in 2010 when CPS threatened to demolish it. The bosses eventually succeeded, but many immigrant workers and PLP comrades fought and learned much in the process.
It’s those lessons and fighting spirit that we’ll maintain during the struggles ahead, part of the broader struggle to overcome all the capitalist bosses’ attacks by winning more workers to a communist future.
