Racism and racist oppression exist to support and enhance exploitation, or wage slavery, the political-economic foundation of capitalism. Anti-Black racism is the basis for the oppression of Black workers in all spheres of life and, in the U.S., along with the genocide of the indigenous population, it’s also the foundation for the racist oppression and exploitation of Latin and immigrant workers. And it is the source of AT LEAST $500 BILLION in “super-profits”: that is the difference between the household income of white and Black families.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 17 million Black households in the U.S. In 2019, the median income of those families was $41,361. The median household income of white families was $70,642. If the bosses were to pay those Black families the same as white families, they would have to fork over an additional $497 BILLION, reducing the bosses’ profits by that half TRILLION dollars. [$70,642 x 17 million families = $1,200,914,000,000; $41,361 x 17 million families = $703,137,000,000] [$70,642-$41,361=$29,281 income differential per family X 17 million families=$ billion extra profit for the capitalists]
This super-exploitation of Black workers is the combined legacy of 401 years of slavery, followed by Jim Crow/KKK/police violence; enforced racist discrimination in housing, education and healthcare; exclusion of Black veterans from the post-World War II GI Bill — to name only a few examples.
With all the hypocrisy from liberals, conservatives, Democrats and even some Republicans vowing to “do something about systemic racism,” about “reforming” the cops who’ve been enforcing that racism for centuries, and with all the media editorials and politicians’ op-ed pieces decrying this beastly oppression: there is not one solitary word mentioned about that half trillion super-profits reaped from racism.
Nor are there any crocodile tears shed about the use of that racism against Black workers to drive down the wages of the entire working class, including white workers. Major economic studies (documented in Racial Inequality by Michael Reich, 1981) demonstrate the greater the racist wage differentials between Black and white workers, the worse the living conditions, healthcare, education, welfare/ public services, and labor unionization rates are for white workers also. This is another untold source of still extra profit for the capitalist exploiters.
Racism hurts and divides Black, Latin, Asian, white and immigrant workers and prevents working class unity that would fight the bosses’ attacks on our entire class. We draw on history’s countless examples of multiracial working class fightback to smash racism at its source: capitalism.
The rulers will never surrender their capitalist profit system peacefully. It cannot be reformed. It must be overthrown. The working class that is taking to the streets by the tens of thousands to oppose racist police terror must be won to see that only communist revolution — wiping out the bosses and their profits — can destroy this racist system. That is the goal of the Progressive Labor Party!

BAY AREA, CA—Thousands of cars and bicyclists caravanned through Oakland on May 31 to protest George Floyd’s racist murder and those of many others by the kkkcops. Floyd was executed in a public lynching. His murderer, Derek Chauvin—the subject of 18 complaints and three previous shootings of suspects, one fatal—has been charged with murder.
The May 31 caravan involved many younger workers, Black, Latin, Asian and white. The mass rage against racism is thrilling.
Progressive Labor Party had 8 cars, 17 people in the caravan. We got our message out with posters and red flags. We distributed CHALLENGE and over 200 PLP leaflets condemning police murder and calling for revolution. Stuck in the massive multiracial "rush hour," we talked to people in cars alongside us. One immigrant worker from El Salvador reminded us that the U.S. military had armed and trained the Salvadoran military and criminal gangs to terrorize rebelling workers in El Salvador just as the police function in the U.S. Capitalism rules with racist terror all over the world.
The Oakland caravan was part of a multiracial uprising against racist police murder. The San Francisco Bay Area has seen demonstrations every day—in Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, and elsewhere—of tens of thousands of Black, Latin, Asian, white and indigenous workers. These marches echo the response of millions of workers worldwide to this racism. The police responded violently to non-violent protests. 15,000 high school students, parents and teachers protested police murders in Oakland on June 1. Unprovoked, cops tear gassed them and shot rubber bullets—before the curfew of 8 PM. They did the same in San Jose on May 31.
 Psychologists and the legal system defend racist cops
The Department of Justice and District Attorneys have protected fascist police who kill us. In 2015, psychologist William Lewinski toured the U.S. training cops to kill and rely on him to take care of the legal end. In the last decade, he had testified or consulted in 200 legal cases defending police accused of murder. His company, Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers to shoot pre-emptively before they see a gun (New York Times, 8/2/2015). Fearing our class unity, the bosses call protestors looters. They plant rock-throwing window-busting provocateurs to discredit them.
Can we organize workers to overthrow capitalism and its state and create a communist society? Workers’ response to George Floyd’s racist murder by cops tells us, “YES.” Our job is to take our message to workers: capitalism needs racism, and racist police terror is part of what holds the capitalists in power. Only communism can end this.
Workers unite against racism
U.S. capitalism was built on racism: divide Black, white and indigenous workers and keep the rulers on top (see The Road not Taken by Lerone Bennett)
Black and Latin workers are exploited and oppressed far more than white workers, particularly white male workers; this creates millions of super-profits for the capitalist class (see page 4). All workers experience the horrors of life under capitalism: job insecurity, pandemics, wars, inadequate wages, bad medical care, false arrest, police murder and homelessness. Black, Latin, indigenous, Asian, and immigrant workers—especially women—have far worse conditions, but these horrors affect all workers.
We need to unite as comrades in the struggle against capitalism. When one group of workers is stratified, isolated and attacked to create a “low wage group of the reserved army of labor,” all workers suffer from lower wages and worse living conditions.
Loyal to our class rather than “race,” workers can overcome divisions. We need to see through this divisive strategy and unite to fight for the needs of all. This means a communist world, a world where we work to serve one another’s needs, not the bosses’ profits. As Marx said a century ago, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin, where in the black it is branded.”

Comrade Arnie Indenbaum died at 12:01 AM on May 2 at the age of 92, a minute after the close of May Day. Arnie had been one of the early members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM — predecessor of the Progressive Labor Party) —  and was at its founding conference in July 1962. One of his first responsibilities was to help organize a student trip to Cuba, breaking the travel ban instituted by President Kennedy. For this action he and other PLM members and supporters were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was conducting an anti-communist witch-hunt to enforce the travel ban.
Fighting anti-communist intimidation
Arnie refused to cooperate with HUAC’s red-baiting. He charged the Committee with “attempting to prevent U.S. students from exercising their right to travel and from finding out the specific nature of the Cuban system.” He testified that “what the U.S. government and this Committee [HUAC] says about Cuba is an outrageous distortion and lie.”Arnie’s indictment of HUAC was part of a campaign which PLM —  and later the PLP —  launched to expose the Committee’s anti-communism, including mass demonstrations in Buffalo and Washington, leading to HUAC’s eventual dissolution.
PLM on the railroad
Arnie was a brakeman on the New York Central R.R. for ten years until being laid off in 1963. He participated in numerous actions opposing the company’s mass layoffs, including a slowdown which had its quick-witted side. Arnie was walking ever-so-slowly alongside an engine that was crawling up Manhattan’s east side tracks. The exasperated engineer finally called out to Arnie to “speed it up a little; you’re making me look bad.” Arnie had a great sense of humor.
Arnie loved music, especially early jazz, and enjoyed classical music, even opera. He always had a record on, playing the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ben Webster, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and the occasional Pavarotti.
Many folks didn’t know Arnie was a serious scholar of Shakespeare. Over the course of decades, he read and studied Shakespeare, developing a keen and deep understanding of the playwright’s work from a class perspective.
Organizing in later years
Arnie worked as an electrician and a grip in the film industry for many years. For health reasons he left that work and ultimately came to own and operate AS-IS, a small antique book and record store in Manhattan’s West Village. The store — always with music playing in the background —  was a place where many people would stop by for coffee, political discourse and often a good laugh. Arnie always took a particular interest in the young people in his life. He mentored many.
Arnie’s last few years were marked by failing health. His contribution to the building of a communist future will be sorely missed but never forgotten.

“There are decades where nothing
happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
—Vladimir Lenin

Millions of workers in more than 50 countries have taken the streets with bold and inspiring rebellions against the racist police lynchings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and too many others. The uprisings expose a system that has failed on every level. From Nigeria to Pakistan, from Mexico and Brazil to Germany and France, this antiracist movement has electrified the workers of the world to fight back against the capitalist bosses’ terror.
Mass multiracial struggle is unstoppable when it’s led by politically advanced Black workers and communist ideas. Many workers have embraced communist leadership in this moment. Many more are looking for something better than the rulers’ sell-out liberal politicians, their merry-go-round of empty reforms, and their brutal path toward fascism and inter-imperialist war. It is the historic task of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to lead the international working class to seize state power, smash the capitalists’ dictatorship, and end for all time the profit system’s deadly racism and sexism. The only solution to murders-by-cop is communist revolution!
Capitalist bosses: the most violent criminals
When huge protests broke out after George Floyd’s execution by four killer cops in Minneapolis, the rulers’ media and politicians first focused on a handful of looters and a few firebombed police cars. They condemned what they called “riots” and demanded that all protests be “peaceful.”
Meanwhile, anyone on the streets—or with a working television—was witnessing the systematic violence of the baton-swinging Klan-in-blue. As thousands of workers risked their health and lives in a pandemic to protest racist police murder, the bosses doubled down with more fascist terror. In Brooklyn, a police van drove into a crowd of demonstrators. In Buffalo, the kkkops knocked down a 75-year-old man and left him bleeding on the concrete with a critical head injury. The bosses’ mad dogs indiscriminately shot people in the head with rubber bullets, leaving some permanently blinded. Reporters were clearly targeted. (When U.S. capitalism is in crisis, “constitutional rights” don’t apply.) In Louisville, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was riddled with eight bullets after narcotics detectives invaded her home, and a “community pillar” named David McAtee was shot and killed outside his barbecue restaurant (abcnews.com, 6/2).
When the bosses’ bought-and-paid-for mayors imposed curfews, a historic tool “to restrict the movement and liberties of free and enslaved” Black workers (Washington Post, 6/3), the cops had a green light for chemical warfare with tear gas and pepper spray. As he made the marchers even more vulnerable to Covid-19, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the cops for their “restraint.” Governor Andrew Cuomo, the mayor’s fellow liberal fascist, denied that cops had bludgeoned protesters “for no reason,” a bald-faced lie he was forced to walk back (slate.com, 6/4). In Washington, DC, as Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump cowered in his White House bunker, top Pentagon officials ordered National Guard helicopters to buzz low over nearby demonstrators, a “display of force usually reserved for combat zones” (New York Times, 6/6).
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. During the pandemic, uncounted tens of thousands of workers around the world have died in their homes for lack of access to health care. Many were turned away by overwhelmed local hospitals after decades of budget cuts and closings. As always, Black, Latin, and indigenous workers have been ravaged out of proportion to their population. More than 1,200 U.S. health and medical workers published an open letter hailing the protests, calling anti-racism “vital to the public health” (CNN, 6/5).
Police murder: as American as apple pie
Despite plummeting U.S. crime rates over the last 30 years, police department budgets have kept steadily going up. Each year, the cops kill about 1,000  workers, a high percentage of them Black or Latin. Every so often, a new police reform is adopted: civilian review boards, or body cameras, or “racial sensitivity” training. Or the next wave of Black mayors and police chiefs. None of them make any difference. Democratic politicians are just as complicit in these lynchings as Republicans. During his eight years as president, Barack Obama and his Black attorney general, Eric Holder, refused to bring charges against the police who slaughtered Michael Brown in Ferguson, or Eric Garner on Staten Island, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore. They sat on their hands after Trayvon Martin was killed by a civilian wannabe cop in Florida. When protesters lit up Baltimore after Gray’s murder, Obama blasted them as criminals and “thugs,” the classic racist code for Black rebels (Reuters, 6/1).
Since the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, in a period of extreme racist inequality and the breakdown of basic infrastructure to keep workers alive and healthy, U.S. billionaires have looted an additional $434 billion (Common Dreams, 5/28). With rising instability both within the U.S. and internationally, the bosses need social control more than ever. Though they may try to quell the protests by restructuring the police, the bosses cannot outsource the class war against furious workers. They need their kkkops for that. As the Washington Post noted, “Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents” (6/8).
The new abolitionism
Joe Biden, the racist nitwit the Democrats are running against Trump, has his own shameful history as a police shill. In a speech on the Senate floor in 1994, the year he authored the legislation that ushered in mass incarceration in the U.S., Biden said, “Anybody who does not want cops, then do not ask for them; send them my way. Send them to Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton, the area I live in. And my daughter will be safer, my wife will be safer, my mother will be safer, and I will be safer. And I will be happy” (NYT, 6/1). More recently, as workers rebelled, Biden offered a suggestion to improve police training: [Y]ou shoot ‘em in the leg instead of in the heart” (foxnews.com, 6/1).
More sophisticated reformers, like Black Lives Matter, have proposed a package of eight measures they claim would reduce police violence by 72 percent. Others, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are leading calls to “defund” the cops and limit their scope of operations. The Minneapolis City Council went so far as to declare its intent to “dismantle” and “abolish” its rabid police force (The Guardian, 6/7). Mainstream Democrats like Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are pushing back against these initiatives. The finance capitalists, the bosses’ main wing, have a problem they cannot solve. On the one hand, they need to keep the loyalty of Black workers, both to get Trump out of office and, down the road, to fight in World War III. On the other hand, they need the cops to defend the bosses’ interests by terrorizing workers—and specifically Black workers. Black women and men, the most exploited and oppressed, have the greatest potential to give our class revolutionary leadership.  
While Black Lives Matter’s reformism and identity politics are dangerous and divisive to our class, it’s a positive sign that more workers are aspiring to live in “a police-free society,” as the Minneapolis Council president called it. But we won’t be able to get there until we destroy capitalism, the source of all racism and inequality.
Communism is the only alternative—join PLP!
As the revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The ruling class will not peacefully hand over their state power or give up their trillions of dollars of profits. If only it were so easy! Historically, big changes—even within the limits of a reform struggle—come about only after workers resort to violence. Consider John Brown and the other armed abolitionists who helped to end slavery, or the gunfighting union coal miners of the 1920s. The gains of the U.S. civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened without armed self-defense groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice—or the bosses’ fear that urban uprisings would destroy their assets and undermine their Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.
But 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. Though their communist revolutions were later reversed, that’s what happened in Russia and China. That’s what Progressive Labor Party believes in. Individualistic looting or spontaneous violence won’t get workers what we need. Working class anger is a good and powerful thing, but it must be directed in a strategic way against the bosses. We need millions of workers internationally to join us to smash the bosses’ state with violent communist revolution.
Over the last two weeks, a multiracial, multigenerational, international fightback has given us a glimpse of workers’ potential and power. In New York and Minneapolis, bus drivers refused to take detained protestors off to jail. In Washington, a man sheltered 70 young rebels in his home overnight to help them avoid arrest. Medical workers are heading straight from their long hospital shifts to the latest rally. We don’t need the bosses’ politicians to pacify our anger. We don’t need the bosses’ cops to keep “order” by choking the life out of our brothers and sisters. We are who we have been waiting for!
At some point, the street protests will die down. That’s when we’ll need to carry the same fighting spirit back to our jobs and schools and churches. End the capitalist police state nightmare! Fight for communism! Join PLP!