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A terrorist system cannot stop individual terrorists
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- 09 March 2018 28 hits
U.S. bosses’ hypocrisy has been front and center since the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which a student murdered 17 of his former classmates and staff members with an assault weapon. This open act of terrorism has further identified splits within the ruling class, as Democrats and Republicans make a show of battling over gun control on a national stage.
Neither demands for gun control—nor, on the other side, for proposals to arm teachers—will save working-class lives. The liberal bosses’ calls for perceived safety and control (read: trust the capitalist state, consent to fascism) will never protect the working class—only we can break our own chains. Progressive Labor Party counts on you to join us and build a mass movement against the capitalist rulers’ imperialism, by far the biggest killer of working class lives.
Violent system begets violence
The United States was built on systematic murder. It grew out of genocide for indigenous peoples and enslavement and Jim Crow for Black workers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the ruling class supported gun ownership, freely arming members of the KKK and killer cops who continue to murder workers to this day.
Internationally, the U.S. unequivocally supports the murder of workers to maintain control of resources, people, and land. During both World Wars, the U.S. killed indiscriminately, from the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the U.S. became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in combat. From Syria to Yemen to Afghanistan, U.S. bosses continue to murder workers to protect their control over Middle Eastern oil.
The U.S. ruling class is not for gun control; they will arm people when it suits them. They are for profit control. But while these big terrorists will kill millions without a blink to keep their profits flowing, they also understand that domestic terrorism is bad for their global brand.
Domestic terrorism hurts global credibility
Historically, demands for or against gun control in the U.S. have fallen along party lines. Republicans continue to get re-elected and line their pockets with favorable advertising and funding from the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2016 alone, this fascist organization spent nearly $140 million on “legislative programs and public affairs,” including $30 million on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and at least $20 million on Republican Senate races (huffingtonpost.com, 11/16/17).
Meanwhile, the Democrats are seizing an opportunity to win allegiance from workers and control a growing mass movement within the limits of electoral politics. Democratic politicians are leading rally cries to slap down the NRA and pass stronger laws to restrict the sales of firearms:
Democrats have scrambled to dust off a raft of gun-control legislation that’s sat on the shelf for years: expanding background checks, allowing police and family members to ask judges to disarm gun owners who show signs of violence or instability, prohibiting gun sales to people deemed too unstable to handle their own finances, raising taxes on guns and ammo, changing the gun-buying age from 18 to 21 (Rolling Stone 3/1).
The rulers’ main wing, representing finance capital, is now calling for gun control so as to not to lose more ground to its imperialist arch-rivals, Russia and China. China’s Global Times recently shamed the U.S. in an editorial titled, “China can offer lessons to U.S. in protecting human rights” (2/22). It reads:
Washington has been pointing an accusing finger at other countries over human rights issue[s]. However, more [people in the U.S.] have been killed by gunfire in the country than [U.S.] soldiers being killed in all U.S. wars. It’s inhumane for the U.S., which boasts about its human rights record, to turn a blind eye to gun violence, [to] snub increasing calls for gun control and risk more innocent lives….The US should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights.
The U.S. ruling class has not controlled violence domestically because it does not want to. In Australia, a capitalist country where more than 17 percent of children live in poverty, the government created stricter gun laws after one mass shooting in 1996. Since then, not a single mass shooting has occurred (BBC, 10/4/17). Gun control or lack-there-of is not a mystery, it’s a conscious political decision. Infringing upon workers’ rights, in particular their right to live, is the capitalist way.
The rulers’ main wing, however, understands these flawed optics and is now striving to control—not stop—national murders in an effort to save face as an international super power and regain the trust of workers within the U.S. As the mostly white students from Parkland call for revised gun legislation, main wing Democrats are seizing an opportunity to get disaffected workers to vote in the coming midterm elections in 2018.
Reform vs. revolution, rifle edition
Gun violence in the U.S. has disproportionately affected Black and Latin workers. They are the ones brutalized most egregiously at the hands of murderous police, yet no one is calling for legislation to disarm hyper-militarized police forces.
Black youth have been calling for gun control for years. No action was taken in 2012, after racist vigilante George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in Florida. In 2014, after the murder of Michael Brown, Black working-class leaders in Ferguson organized a militant fightback, which Mass Murderer in Chief Barack Obama dismissed by saying he had “no sympathy at all for [people] destroying [their] own communities” (CNN 11/26/14).
But on February 22, to the students of Parkland, Obama tweeted: “…Marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be. We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”
When Black and Latin workers fight to remove guns from their neighborhoods, they are rejected and reprimanded. But when white students call for reform and appeal for the assistance of opportunistic lawmakers, they are applauded.
Under capitalism, gun control is about controlling the working class, containing their protests, and attempting to lead them like sheep to trust a system that will ultimately orchestrate their own deaths. In recent months, we have seen the bosses mobilize in the Alabama election against Klansman and gun nut Roy Moore. We have seen it throughout the #MeToo movement, and now we are seeing it clearly in the chorus of calls for gun control.
But the fact remains that Black workers are the key to communist revolution, and that none of the bosses’ guns—or gun control—can stop a conscious working class.
Freedom from mass shootings is revolution
The U.S. has been built on mass murder of the working class. Conversations about arming teachers and intensified background checks are not about protection; they are about normalizing fascism in schools.
The only freedom workers can have from mass violence and killings is to unite as a class—to form an international, multiracial, revolutionary front against the bosses.
In the hands of the masses, armed with communist class-consciousness and led by the Progressive Labor Party, organized violence can be revolutionary. One day, the international working class will bury these mass slaughterers with the very weapons we have built.
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Lerone Bennett, Jr., 1928-2018 A lifetime of anti-racist myth-busting
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- 09 March 2018 49 hits
Against the deliberate evasion and enshrouding of the truth, Lerone Bennett, Jr. was among the first scholars to survey Black history and lay bare the roots of racism. This Black historian and longtime editor of Ebony magazine spent a lifetime fighting the racist rewrite of history. In his landmark The Shaping of Black America, he wrote:
In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. ...Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy – the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.
In “The Road Not Taken,” a groundbreaking chapter from this book, Bennett demonstrates that race and racism were created by a vulnerable and outnumbered ruling class elite facing the prospect of multiracial working class rebellion. He chronicles over a century of deliberate use of state power, both legislative and violent, to define and separate Black and white.
In “Black Power in the Old South,” from his first major work, Before the Mayflower, Bennett sketches a portrait of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, where the temporary exercise of federal power to suppress organized racism led to a brief flowering of multiracial social gatherings and political power that has yet to be seen again in the American South.
Thomas Jefferson, slave-owning grandfather
When the entire historical establishment still heeded the racist denials of Jefferson’s white descendants, Bennett was moved by an unwavering confidence in the story of Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson and of Sally Hemings, the slave the third U.S. president repeatedly raped from the time she was an adolescent. (Over his lifetime as a wealthy Virginia plantation master, Jefferson owned more than 600 Black people.)
In his 1954 article, “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” Bennett points out the vicious hypocrisy of the author of the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that “all men are created equal.” As Bennett documented, Jefferson’s denial of his Black children with Hemings was cruelly and tragically unequal. (In fact, Jefferson kept those children enslaved until they came of age.)
Bennett went on to expose the stark inequities that four generations of racist U.S. “democracy” created between Jefferson’s white and Black descendants. The fact that Jefferson fathered six children by Hemings was widely accepted by mainstream historians only after DNA evidence emerged in 1998. Bennett was more than forty years ahead of his time.
Abraham Lincoln,ethnic cleanser
Bennett’s Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream is still met with disapproval from the Lincoln cult in the mainstream historical establishment. In this 662-page magnum opus, published in 2000, Bennett quotes directly from Lincoln’s papers and contemporaries to present the man as he was—a lifelong and committed racist. He portrays the rising politician in 1848, when Lincoln undertook a dogged campaign to strip free Black people of the vote and even to fund a program to deport all Black residents from Illinois. The stance that carried Lincoln to the presidency was not so much anti-slavery as anti-Black—a “White Dream” in Bennett’s words, to colonize all ex-slaves out of the U.S. after the Civil War.
Bennett’s unmasking of the white supremacist Lincoln is unlikely to be accepted by the court historians of the U.S. ruling class as long as the capitalists hold state power. But under communism, in the anti-racist, more objective future to come, this work will be vindicated as well. Bennett’s scholarship will be part of the foundation for a new understanding of the U.S. past.
When mainstream scholars ignore Bennett’s takedowns of icons like Jefferson and Lincoln, or his game-changing analysis of the roots of U.S. slavery, they remind us of the lies and omissions in capitalist chronicles of the communist past, as well. Ruling-class institutions cannot afford to tell the truth about the history of racism, a necessity for the profit system and all of its brutal inequalities. Nor can they tell the truth about communism, the only threat to the bosses’ class rule.
An intellectual’s legacy must be examined in historical context. Lerone Bennett, Jr. was shaped by times of massive, multiracial, anti-racist political upsurge. He saw more clearly than most what would be needed to take those movements forward to ultimate victory.
While Bennett was not a communist, the clarity and integrity of his work has inspired countless anti-racists and communists in challenging the falsehoods that prop up the capitalists’ dictatorship. He enriched our struggle and helped pave the way for new generations of worker-intellectuals to create a communist society. The Progressive Labor Party will guarantee that future revolutionaries learn the important lessons Bennett lived to teach us.
March 8 is celebrated as International Women’s Day all over the world. Many people are unaware of the working class origins of this day.
The Second International was the international organization of the socialist movement. Before the First World War, this movement contained some progressive elements. In 1910 the Second Women’s Conference of the Second International established International Women’s Day. Clara Zetkin, who later became a communist leader in Germany, proposed the following resolution:
In agreement with the class-conscious, political and trade union organizations of the proletariat...the socialist women of all countries will hold each year a Women’s Day, whose foremost purpose it must be to aid the attainment of women’s suffrage. This demand must be handled in conjunction with the entire women’s question according to socialist precepts. The Women’s Day must have an international character and is to be prepared carefully.
The date of March 8 was chosen because on that date in 1908 there was a mass demonstration of socialist-led women workers from the needle (textile) trades in New York City. The demonstration demanded the vote and mass organizing of women in the needle trades.
In 1914 in Russia Aleksandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and other Bolshevik women published Rabotnitsa, a Bolshevik journal for working-class women. The first issue was published on March 8. On March 8, 1917, a bold strike of women textile workers was supported by mas demonstrations that led to the overthrow of the Tsar.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, International Women’s Day was established as an official celebration every year in the Soviet Union.
International Women’s Day became a symbol of resistance to the oppression of women workers all over the world. On March 8, 1923, the communist-led Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) began a campaign in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU, now called Unite) and other needle trade unions to rebuild militancy and fight for unions controlled by their rank-and-file members.
On March 8, 1927, in Uzbekistan, a republic in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) began a mass campaign against the religious custom of forcing women to wear the veil (paranja or burqa). This was really a robe that covered the whole face and body. It was extremely hot and uncomfortable, and hindered a woman’s movement. The paranja symbolized the most oppressive aspects of the oppression of women. It had to go.
Finally, with the political work done, the time for action came. There was a mass burning of paranjas amid the playing of The Internationale, the communist anthem.
On that day ... tens of thousands of women, huddled in paranjas and chachvans poured like a menacing avalanche through the narrow choked streets, squares and bazaars of the ancient Central Asian cities...The vast multitude, including a number of men and children, gathered round the Lenin monument, which was likewise decked with red banners and native carpets, and the women waited breathlessly for what was to come....All the bands struck up the Internationale. ... The real proceedings began. ... They [the paranjas] were flung aloft into the quivering air, timidly at first, but then with ever wilder and more frenzied speed, these symbols of slavery that the women cast off, paranjas, chachvans and chadras. They were piled in rapidly growing heaps, drenched with paraffin, and soon the dark clouds of smoke from the burning common abjuration of a thousand year old convention, now become unbearable, flared up into the bright sky of the spring day. .. (Hewlett Johnson, The Socialist Sixth of the World)
Although we in Progressive Labor Party understand that winning the right to vote for any worker only helps to keep the capitalists in power by making them look more “democratic”, we also recognize the revolutionary side of the history of International Women’s Day.
We fight against sexism because it means the super-exploitation of women, and because it divides the working class. It is crucial to attack sexist practices, and to celebrate the vital role played by women communist leaders, as seen in our own Party. We use the name International Working Women’s Day in order to help show the interrelationship between capitalism and sexism.
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With Student & Parent solidarity, Teachers STRIKE, Defy BOSSES
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- 09 March 2018 42 hits
WEST VIRGINIA, March 7—33,000 education workers shut down schools in a two-week strike, shaking the entire state, and inspiring workers nationwide to gear up for a similar fight.
In a period when strikes are at a historic low, and class anger has been steered towards the bosses’ Democratic Party or participating in passive marches, the education workers in West Virginia flexed their workers’ power and set an example for their 270,00 students.
This mainly-women workers’ rebellion have not only combatted the state politicians and defied their laws (striking and collective bargaining is illegal in the state), but they have also defied their union misleaders who tried to put a quick end to the strike.
The state conceded to a five-percent raise and a hold on raising health insurance costs.
Workers, students, parents, and communists in Progressive Labor Party should use this momentum to build multiracial unity. We can point to the student-parent-teacher unity as a germ of collectivity. We can win people to the communist idea that the working class doesn’t need the bosses, union leaders, or politicians to run society.
Poor working conditions mainly hurt students
Students stood in solidarity with education workers and organized under the hashtag #SecureOurFuture. Many bus drivers refused to go to work, forcing schools to cancel classes. State Senate President Mitch Carmichael tried to shame workers when she said teachers were “leaving the students out in the cold.”
One striker said, “There is nothing that we don’t do for our kids here if they need. So, to insult us that we don’t care about our kids is way over the line.”
The working conditions in schools are students’ learning conditions. By rebelling against the bosses’ state, workers are teaching students a profound lesson: accepting capitalism’s retched conditions cannot be an option. We must fight back.
While the demands and outlook for the strike are for basic reforms, the militancy and leadership among the strikers show us the potential the working class has in truly becoming a revolutionary force in the class struggle.
Despicable conditions for mainly white workers
West Virginia is a “Right to Work” state, which means workers can refuse to be a union member. The state, 93 percent white, has one of the lowest standards of living in the country. At a starting salary of $31,000/year, education workers here are among the lowest paid. After deducting health care costs, many teachers make less than $15 an hour. “I worry constantly about how I am going to afford my medicine,” said a teacher with 20 years on the job. This goes to show that white workers are no exception to the rule of exploitation. It is in our class interest to fight with multiracial unity.
Rank and file defies union misleaders
Shortly after the strike began, union misleaders from the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) tried to stop the strike based on a “promise” by Governor Jim Justice. The workers weren’t having it.
“Initially we thought we won…And then the union leaders…talked to us and we realized really quickly we did not win anything. The crowd turned very angry very quickly,” one teacher said. Rank and file members, defied their union leaders and continued to strike.
Learning from miners
West Virginia was the site of the largest labor uprising in U.S. history— the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. Some 1,000 armed miners battled strikebreakers and private cops. The president sent in the army. Class struggle is nothing new to workers here.
One teacher said, “The union wars, they originated [here] in…Mingo County. We believe we’re following in their footsteps.”
The Coal Wars saw thousands of coal miners engage in armed struggle against federal troops and strike breakers just to win a union. They wore red neckerchiefs, the original “red necks.”
Clearly, winning a union is not enough, important as that may be. As long as the bosses hold power, no victory is ever secure. It will take communist revolution to end the profit system that thrives on war, racism, and poverty.
Strike fever
It appears that “Strike Fever” may be spreading. 1,400 Frontier Communications workers, members of the Communications Workers of America, went on strike on March 4 in West Virginia and Virginia, after ten months of failed contract negotiations. Since Frontier acquired Verizon’s landlines in West Virginia in 2010, the company has cut over 500 jobs.
Teachers in New Jersey and Oklahoma have authorized their union leader to call a strike and have begun making plans. Arizona and Kentucky teachers are also feeling the urge to fight back. The bosses had hoped to keep workers focused on elections in November. A multiracial workers’ strike across the country would strike fear into the hearts of this imperialist ruling class.
It is true that many striking workers are thinking about raising their standard of living, not about the potential political might of workers. However, this strike does show the potential of our class to become leaders. Workers will rise to the occasion. With an infusion of communist politics into the struggle, these rebellions can become schools for communism that win more workers to smash capitalism.
Workers will strike again, and every PLP area should be ready to fight in solidarity. We can help connect the dots on the need to build the revolutionary PLP.
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Interview with Parent Reveals Worker-Parent Unity
The following report is from an interview on March 5 with a West Virginia parent involved in the strike.
Thousands of the state’s striking teachers who massed at the State Capitol today were on line for three hours trying to get into the building and ringed it with a human chain. By noon nearly 9,000 had managed to rally inside. Some stayed over Sunday night to be able to enter today. They are demanding a living wage and fully paid health insurance. A special education teacher with a Master’s Degree and 15 years seniority is paid $45,000 a year. Meanwhile, the state legislators draw the seventh highest salary of all state legislators in the country.
In Cabell County, whose teachers were the first to go out and have been on strike for eight days, over 50 percent of children live below the poverty line. Middle School teachers have traditionally organized food and clothing pantries, and on Fridays send those kids home with ready-to-heat meals to eat on weekends. Many of them are served breakfasts at the start of the school day. Meanwhile, teachers gather leftover untouched meals in the backpacks of low-income students. Teachers deliver meals on school bus routes year round.
In Cabell County, teachers spread out on street corners with signs to give parents and other teachers the latest news on the progress of the walkout. Initially the strike started in this county when the local communications director sent messages via phone to teachers and parents about a “work stoppage,” alerting them that the schools would be closed until the government agreed to the teachers’ demands.
Teachers, parents, and children are all struggling here, where a large number of schools are in rural areas. This is the first time they all have experienced such a strike.
No matter how “woke” a film seems, we can’t rely on the cesspool known as Hollywood to be a voice of freedom. Hollywood, controlled by the ruling class, re-writes history, generates racist and sexist stereotypes to shape mass ideas, and broadcasts ideology that supports U.S. imperialism.
Black Panther—which has already grossed $909.8+ million—is no exception.
Protagonist King T’Challa rules the fictional African country Wakanda. It poses as poor but it’s the wealthiest and most technologically advanced society in the world—with an isolationist policy. Wakanda possesses the most valuable resource, vibranium.
T’Challa’s leadership is tested against the U.S. Black villain Erik Killmonger, who starts off as a bitter antiracist and is determined to replace Western imperialism with his own.
Many antiracists are drawn to this depiction of Black empowerment. After decades of endless racist depictions of the continent of Africa and Black workers in general, finally a movie that shows Black actors at the center of their own narrative. However, representation is not power for the working class.
How to respond to racism?
The examples of anti-Black racism are endless: slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police terror, unequal pay, education, housing, and so on. The U.S. rulers not only mastered racism, but they also exported it worldwide.
But, for every racist attack, there has been a counterattack. This fightback has varied from movements for Black capitalism to organizing multiracial unity to overthrow capitalism.
Black Panther highlights two paths to responding to a racist world. One path is nationalist isolationism, which then morphs into reformism, led by the ruling-class T’Challa. The other path recognizes a need to change the system, promoted by working-class Killmonger.
Rebellion still causes fear in the hearts of rulers—Ferguson and Baltimore are prime examples. The potential for these rebellions to be infused with communist ideology and multiracial unity is the ruling class’s ultimate fear.
Wakandan foreign policy
Wakandan society is a Pan-African collective of different ethnic groups. The viewer is drawn to the powerful Black women on screen—warriors, engineers, scientists, agents, and mostly all royalty—whose role are all purposed for nation building. #Wakandaforver. But at the end of the day, they all serve the king in this theocratic monarchy.
T’Challa initially wants to preserve Wakandan rightwing isolationist policy while engaging in secret trade with the world. This position is, “foreigners will ruin Wakanda.”
Antiracist turned imperialist
Killmonger offers the sharpest criticisms of racism. Rather than an enlightened revolutionary, this Black man from Oakland is rendered as a dangerous psychopath. His name Killmonger says it all.
Killmonger’s father N’Jobu was part of the royal Wakandan family. N’Jobu, sent to Oakland to spy on the world it refuses to engage with, quickly learns of the systematic racism Black workers face. The then-King murders N’Jobu for trying to use vibranium technology to foment and arm an antiracist rebellion in the U.S.
One of Killmonger’s best lines is, “Two billion people all over the world who look like us, whose lives are much harder, and Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all. Where was Wakanda?” He reveals the hypocrisy of the Wakandan ruling class who, despite having the power to take action, ignored slavery, colonialism, and worldwide racism in the name of self-preservation.
He wants to use vibranium to execute an all-Black revolution where he is the ruler. His agenda turns out to be a revenge fantasy. Killmonger becomes King and threatens to kill anyone who defies him. This reinforces the myth that being revolutionary leads to a power-hungry brutal dictatorship. His grand strategy of fighting global racism is borrowed from British imperialism’s playbook when he states, “the sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire.”
New global order
After T’Challa kills Killmonger, T’Challa is won to reversing the isolationist policy. His solution is in line with Nakia, a special forces agent and his love interest.
Nakia understands the impossibility of isolationism in a world shaped by inequality. She argues, “Wakanda is strong enough to help others and protect itself.” Nakia’s views of global reform prevail.
T’Challa’s monologue at the UN (of course) concludes the film: “Wakanda will no longer watch from the shadows…More connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers.”
They also go to Oakland to open a community center for Black youth. This is the “solution” —Black elites need to provide resources and misleadership to the working class.
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class needs more Black leadership—to save capitalism. The Brookings Institute, an imperialist think tank, wrote a review of Black Panther. In addition to calling out “Hollywood, it’s about time,” they wrote:
“Black Panther” has unequivocally become one of many recent inflection points for the African American community, especially following the success of extraordinary black voter turnout in tough southern elections…[S]ince the end of the historic and groundbreaking Obama presidency, black people have been searching for a superhero, or a “yes we can” leader like T’Challa. For two hours, he becomes more than a comic-book superhero. He transforms into a symbol of hope for African Americans, much like President Obama was during the previous eight years (2/26).
Even before the hot mess that is president Trump, the U.S. bosses have been desperate to win back allegiance to this kill-mongering system. They need T’Challas, Michelles, and Baracks. This is the ultimate message.
Masses, not a superhero, will save the day
Neither T’Challa nor Killmonger are the solutions for the working class.
The working class needs Black, especially Black women, leadership—for communism. Black workers have a long history of fightback. From the slave revolts, rebellions in the workplace and military, to Ferguson and Baltimore, Black workers continue to be the key to worldwide communist revolution and the ultimate liberation of all working people.
Marvel’s Black Panther appeals to the anti-racism that many of us share, but co-opts the anger of Black workers and pushes a reformist, Black capitalist agenda. To defeat the real super villain, capitalism, we need a mass communist revolution and millions of working-class heroes.