Staten Island, NY, July 17—Over 250 people, including members of Progressive Labor Party, marched to and boldly denounced the 120th Precinct in Staten Island, the same precinct responsible for Eric Garner’s murder exactly two years ago.
This rally was organized by The Legacy Eric Garner Left Behind (named after his last daughter, Legacy) and supported by Staten Island Against Racism and Police Brutality (SiaraPB). Eric Garner’s family, friends, and working class brothers and sisters feel sorrow. We miss Eric Garner, known as a “gentle giant” and nicknamed Nice. Whether he sold cigarettes or not does not justify the racist murder. After trying to break up a fight between two other people, he was choked to death by one cop as several others held onto him.
The soundtrack after the choking of Eric saying “I can’t breathe” eleven times has echoed around the world. Once everyone arrived at the police station, the crowd broke up and attempted to surround the whole block around the police station. A dozen vans and forty cars showed up.
At the precinct and during the march, PLP distributed CHALLENGE and lead people in militant chants like, “How do you spell racist? NYPD!” to show our rage not just at Pantaleo but at all the police who continue to terrorize Black, Latin, and immigrant workers.
These murders are business as usual for the police. They are part of a system that depends on racism to make profits and keep people divided so that they don’t fight back. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected with a promise to end “Stop and Frisk”, a policing practice where police stopped people on the street to search them for weapons or drugs. It is a racist policy that allows police to harass Black and Latin workers. DeBlasio’s first act as mayor was to hire police commissioner William Bratton, who substituted “Stop and Frisk” for “Broken Windows” policing. In this kind of policing, police arrest workers for small “crimes” like selling loose cigarettes or panhandling with the excuse that it will prevent more serious crimes. This is merely another way to continue the racist oppression of Black, Latin, and immigrant workers by giving cops a different excuse to harass, arrest and imprison workers.
This policy is a way that kkkops, politicians, and real estate bosses cooperate to gentrify an area. In New York City, San Francisco, and Newark, “Broken Windows” policing is used to intimidate Black workers out of neighborhoods so that they can rebrand the neighborhood as a “safe” area, develop it, and raise rents. The same thing happened in Brazil when the government was preparing for the World Cup. Thousands of workers were ruthlessly evicted from their houses and the slums were demolished, all in the name of developing valuable real estate.
If not reforms, then what?
Our march gives us an insight as to what we can do instead of fruitless reforms. Our march was multiracial and we took the street. Multiracial unity is much more powerful than a body camera. One leader of SiaraPB gave a speech about the continuing fight SiaraPB has been waging in the community and on the campus of the College of Staten Island to bring Pantaleo to trial for murder. She emphasized the multiracial character of SiaraPB and called for unity in the struggle. After the speeches, a local neighborhood youth choir beautifully sang, “I can’t breathe”. Then all of us in sorrow and rage said “I can’t breathe” eleven times. The march was followed by popcorn and ices for neighborhood children and adults who stayed in memory of Eric’s life.
This type of working class unity, where we all fight together and support each other, will ultimately smash racist police terror. A member of PLP gave a speech warning that the only way to end racist police terror is by smashing capitalism once and for all. Politicians want us to believe more Black, Latin, Asian and Muslim cops, body cameras, and “community policing” will make a difference. That won’t help anything. Black kkkops didn’t do any more for Freddie Gray in Baltimore than an Asian kkkop did for Akai Gurley in Brooklyn. In Baton Rouge, where Alton Sterling was murdered as the cops held him down on the ground, the police claim their body cameras “fell off.”
None of the reforms proposed by politicians can address the role of the police. Capitalism is a system built on racism and we must get rid of it to smash racism. She emphasized that whether Black, Latin, Asian, white, immigrant or U.S. born, men or women, we must unite to fight racism together. A united, multiracial working class is the only thing that can smash capitalism and build a communist world. Join the fight!

As U.S. bosses use state terror to murder Black workers in cold blood and send drones to massacre workers and children from Pakistan to Yemen, the same capitalists are hypocritically denouncing regional imperialist ISIS (also known as the Islamic State) for its latest wave of slaughters in Turkey, Bangladesh, and Iraq.
The ISIS misleaders are mass-murdering capitalists cloaked as religious fundamentalists, lashing out in a desperate attempt to hang on to the Middle East oilfields they have seized since 2013. Meanwhile, some of the world’s biggest terrorists—U.S. imperialists, their NATO allies, and rival imperialists in Russia—are intensifying their bombing of ISIS-controlled areas to regain control of those same oilfields.
Whoever controls the production and flow of oil in the Middle East, home to the largest reserves of cheaply extractable petroleum in the world, gains a huge advantage over its competition. The region’s workers are caught in the middle of a deadly imperialist chess game.
ISIS: Death and Taxes
On June 28, at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, Turkey, three suicide bombers killed at least 41 people and wounded more than 200 others. On July 2, in the capital city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, at least 29 people were killed after five ISIS gunmen took hostages in a popular café. On July 3, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, ISIS suicide bombs killed more that 200 people and wounded hundreds more in a busy shopping district. On July 4, four suicide bombers attacked three sites in Saudi Arabia, including one near the U.S. Consulate in Jidda.  
Assuming ISIS was responsible for all of these strikes, why these particular countries? Turkey bridges Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and is an indispensable member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the main instrument of U.S. imperialist interests against Russia. Bangladesh is a staunch U.S. ally and lies a stone’s throw from China, the third big imperialist power. Iraq contains the third-largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is the region’s largest oil producer by far and a strategic counterweight to Russian ally Iran.
As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, and a broader global conflict looms, bosses of all stripes are driven to spill more workers’ blood to protect their investments and gain political, economic and military leverage. In the strategically vital Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Horn of Africa, the bosses’ media has focused on the recent violence by ISIS, the Frankenstein’s monster born out of the cataclysmic, 13-year U.S. war against Iraqi workers. Since mid-2014, ISIS’s proclaimed “caliphate” has lost 50 percent of its territory in Iraq and 20 percent in Syria, along with much of its oil revenue. But even as the group has been forced to cut pay to its fighters, eliminate jobs and bribes, and impose harsh taxes in areas it still holds, it has intensified its indiscriminate killing of Muslim and other workers. As Op-Ed columnist Hasan Hasan noted in the New York Times (7/11):

Some people have suggested that this is a sign of the group’s desperation and weakness. In fact, it demonstrates its strength and long-term survival skills.…. Even American officials have told me privately that the political changes necessary to stem the group’s appeal in Iraq and Syria are lagging behind the military advances. The number of members volunteering to blow themselves up is not a sign of a dying group.
The threat is not going away. The group’s ultimate goal remains unchanged: control of the Muslim world.

Workers Caught in Imperialist Crossfire
The second, far deadlier source of terror comes from Russian and U.S imperialism, which routinely slaughters Muslim workers with both piloted and drone airstrikes. (Although China has signaled a willingness to join the Russian air campaign against ISIS, its current focus is to consolidate military control over the South China Sea and to challenge U.S. economic influence in Latin America and Africa.) In Iraq alone, the U.S. state terrorists have killed more than a million workers and orphaned an estimated 800,000 children (Iraqi Children Foundation website).
The future holds only more devastation for the working class. Beyond their callous destruction of workers’ lives, ISIS terror attacks have given the U.S. state terrorists cover to re-escalate their military presence in Iraq. In April, the fragile Iraqi government gave in to a U.S. push to introduce Army Apache attack helicopters, raise U.S. troop presence to more than 4,000, and move U.S. “advisors” much closer to the front lines (CNN.com, 4/18). On July 11, terrorist-in-chief Barack Obama authorized the deployment of an additional 560 troops to assist in recapturing Mosul, the largest city still controlled by ISIS (New York Times, 7/11).
Terrorism Fuels Fascism
Within the U.S., the bosses are attempting to exploit workers’ fears of terrorism to accelerate the rise of fascism. Spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Shared Responsibilities Committees” have the stated purpose of countering violent extremism in the U.S. Composed of of mental health professionals, social service workers, and religious leaders, among other ruling-class agents, these teams are designed to identify workers who may be “at risk” for committing terrorist acts or joining a terrorist group (Washington Post, 7/5).
The program has already been implemented in communities with large Arab and Muslim populations, like Dearborn, Michigan. Ron Haddad, Dearborn’s police chief, “has a deep network of contacts in the community and makes regular visits to Dearborn’s 38 schools and its many mosques…. At least twice in the past several years, fearing influence from [ISIS] or online propaganda on their children, Haddad says, Muslim fathers have turned in their own sons. In another case, it was students at a largely Muslim high school calling about a troubled peer” (politico.com, 3/24).
All things considered, the big terrorists and little terrorists are more alike than different. All of them exploit, oppress and divide workers to preserve and expand the bosses’ profits. None of them have any qualms about murdering our class brothers and sisters, regardless of race, religion or gender. To overthrow these blood-sucking monsters, the Progressive Labor Party must win masses of workers to fight for international working class unity and mass revolutionary violence. Only then will we smash capitalism and terrorism for all time. Join us!

The racist police murders of Pedro Villanueva, Delrawn Small, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile—on four consecutive days in July—are not isolated incidents or the work of a few “bad cops.” They are all too typical atrocities that expose the true face of capitalism. And they show the working class a glimpse of the heightened racist violence and bigger imperialist wars coming our way.
Capitalism cannot be reformed, nor can it be stopped by a lone wolf sniper firing into a crowd. The Progressive Labor Party fights to eliminate cops and imperialism for all time by destroying capitalism with mass revolutionary violence—with communist revolution.
The road to revolution is long and challenging. But the militant response to the latest wave of killings by cops, in demonstrations from Britain and Canada to New York and Los Angeles, shows that the capitalists haven’t terrorized the international working class into submission. In the German capital of Berlin, more than 120 police were injured in what authorities called “the most aggressive and violent protests in the last five years” (cbsnews.com, 7/10). Workers around the world are once again inspiring millions by fighting back!
Workers’ Response to KKKop Terror: Fight Back!
On Saturday, July 9, 50 members of the Progressive Labor Party led a march from the intersection of Church and Nostrand Avenues in Flatbush, a Black working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn (see photo). PLP has had a presence here for three decades. With chants of “Shut this racist system down!” and “Asian, Latin, Black and white, workers of the world unite,” the multiracial group of communists and friends shut down traffic and marched through an annual street fair on Flatbush Avenue.
Along the way, Black workers raised fists and chanted with us; 50 workers joined the march at various points. PL’ers sold 500 CHALLENGEs and distributed 1,000 leaflets calling for fightback against racist police terror with communist revolution. Even after we ran out of literature halfway through the march, workers continued to approach us to exchange contact information and find out more about us.
Taking the Streets of Manhattan
On Thursday, July 7, thousands of multiracial workers and youth angrily marched out of Union Square at a Black Lives Matter-led rally and took the streets of Manhattan. Chanting “Shut it down!”, they blocked busy streets and snarled miles of traffic. PL’ers sold hundreds of CHALLENGEs and led revolutionary chants, as hundreds of youth pounded on car windows and frustrated cops’ attempts to direct and control the demonstrators.
Workers’ Anger Turning Up Against Killer NYPD KKKop
On July 4, an off-duty New York Police Department officer murdered 37 year-old Black man Delrawn Small at a Brooklyn traffic stop. Videos taken by bystanders show the unarmed Delrawn approaching the vehicle and being immediately shot in the head and chest, contradicting the cop’s claim that Delrawn punched him in the face through the car window. Delrawn’s girlfriend and two children witnessed the cold-blooded killing.
On July 5, dozens of community and family members rallied at the intersection where he was killed. After a pacifying lecture by liberal Black misleader Charles Barron, a New York State assemblyman, the workers and youth heard a militant and heartfelt speech from Small’s brother. Then the crowd—including a multiracial PLP group—took the street in a rally originally organized by Barron with the NYPD’s blessing. But the event soon spun out of this class traitor’s control, as Black and Latin workers and youth aimed their anger at the cops gathered around them. Barron appealed for calm and blamed the protesters for “having their own agenda.” One PL’er called out to Barron, “What about YOUR agenda?”, prompting some laughter from the Smalls family.
Liberal politicians like Barron are wolves in sheep’s clothing. The bosses use them to calm workers’ justified rage and channel it into the bosses’ electoral circus. PL’ers sold CHALLENGEs, made contact with members of the Small family, and have followed up with home visits. Our aim is to unmask the danger posed by liberal snakes like Barron, and to build a mass anti-racist movement against these killer police.
Bosses Need Racist Police Terror
From the U.S. and Mexico to Russia and China, the role of law enforcement in all capitalist countries is to protect private property and suppress the one force that can bring this racist system down: the working class. Meanwhile, the job of the rulers’ politicians is to deceive us with the patently false idea that workers and the bosses’ cops are on the same side and want the same things. President Barack Obama made this message clear at the memorial for the five cops killed in Dallas, Texas: “I see what’s possible when we recognize that we are one American family, all deserving of equal treatment.” The apologist-in-chief skirted the fact that equal treatment is a fantasy in a capitalist country founded in genocide, built by slave labor, and sustained by racist inequalities in every aspect of life.
The misleaders who push identity politics and Black nationalist ideology divide us by misdirecting the blame for racism on white workers. The true problem of the international working class is capitalism, a system organized to generate profits for the few at the expense of the needs of the masses. Capitalism creates the divisive ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism. Capitalism feeds on super-profits from its super-exploitation of Black, Latin, immigrant and women workers. Capitalism leads inevitably to imperialist war, as rival national ruling classes compete for global control over resources, markets and cheaper labor.
Modern U.S. police departments evolved out of early U.S. history, when wealthy landowners funded groups of fugitive slave-catchers. Later, these “law enforcement” officers collaborated with Ku Klux Klan chapters in terrorizing Black worker and keeping them divided from their white and immigrant working-class sisters and brothers through the corrosive pathology of racism.
But the bosses are confronted with a huge contradiction. On the one hand, they need racist police terror to keep the masses in check; on the other, they need these same Black and Latin youth to fight in their unending imperialist wars. While liberals like Obama push all-class unity (a hallmark of rising fascism) and try to limit police violence, gutter racists continue to murder our sisters and brothers in the street.
The bosses can never resolve their contradiction. The job of communists and friends of PLP is to sharpen the contradiction—and ultimately to smash the bosses—by winning workers to fight back in multiracial unity.
Racism, Nationalism Justify Imperialist Wars
Racist state terror in the U.S. can only intensify as the U.S. capitalist class drives toward wider imperialist wars with their Russian and Chinese imperialist rivals. The U.S. and Chinese bosses are in stiff competition over control of the South China Sea and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as economic supremacy in Latin America.
U.S. and Russian imperialists—along with their respective proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran—are vying for control over the oil-rich Middle East and strategically vital Central Asia. With each step closer to a global war, the bosses need more intensive racism—against Muslims and immigrants as well as Black and Latin workers—to divide and intimidate the working class, and to justify mass imperialist slaughter.
Revolution, Not Fake “Solutions”
According to the Mapping Police Violence project, U.S. cops killed at least 346 Black people in 2015—nearly one per day. Black people are more than three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, and Black victims are more than 50 percent more likely to be unarmed. Of the 102 cases (and probably more) where unarmed Black people were killed by cops in 2015, only ten resulted in an officer being charged with a crime. Only two cases resulted in cops being convicted, and only one led to a cop serving significant jail time.
Systemic racism is evident in both the statistics and the nature of these murders. On July 3, for just one example, nineteen-year-old Pedro Villanueva was wantonly gunned down in his pickup truck after a high-speed chase by highway patrolmen in an unmarked car in Fullerton, California. Villanueva’s alleged crime: showing off his driving skills in a parking lot “sideshow” (Los Angeles Times, 7/5). “Friends of Villanueva questioned the officers’ decision to follow the teenager with an unmarked car, contending that he may not have known he was being pursued by police, but rather feared he was being robbed on the dead-end street” (L.A. Times, 7/6).
These recent racist killings expose the futility and emptiness of reform measures—body cameras, “community policing,” sensitivity training and the rest. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Alton Sterling was murdered as the pigs pinned him to the ground, the police department claims that both of the kkkops’ mandated body cameras had coincidentally “fallen off.”
Nor does it do the working class any good to have more police look like their victims. Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who murdered Philando Castile at a suburban Minneapolis traffic stop, is Latin. Three of the kkkops who faced criminal charges for killing Freddie Gray in Baltimore were Black. Twenty of the 68 police chiefs in the Major Cities Chiefs Association are Black (New York Times, 7/11), yet modern-day lynchings by cops continue unabated. A “diversified” police force is still a racist police force.
PLP: For Mass Revolutionary Violence
When 25-year old former Army Reservist Micah Johnson killed five cops at the Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas, he made the work of anti-racists and revolutionaries that much harder. Apparently set off by by the racist police killings of Sterling and Castile, Johnson retreated into individualism and adventurism when he shot the police. In the end, he was murdered by a police drone on wheels—executed without a trial, like so many Black workers in the U.S.
Johnson was reportedly a former member of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), a fringe group that represents nationalism at its worst. Preying on Black workers’ frustration, the group’s leaders target white workers, and Jewish workers in particular, with vile and open racism. Johnson’ outlook was no doubt formed by capitalism’s daily racism, by the trauma of serving in the rulers’ imperialist war in Afghanistan, and by the toxic ideology of the likes of the NBPP. He was driven to mental illness and suicide-by-cop. To the extent that nationalist groups succeed in dividing our class, they help only the bosses. They are a reactionary, anti-revolutionary element
PLP organizes within the bosses’ military to build a mass movement for communism to seize state power and smash the dictatorship of the capitalists. Our strategy means struggling with masses of workers in the military to fight for our international class and turn the guns around—to turn imperialist war into class war for revolution.
Build A Fighting PLP!
Workers are fighting back, and our Party is in the thick of the struggle. Workers rebelled after the July 5 police murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. As we go to press, women-led PLP fighters are marching alongside rebelling workers there (see page ?).
On Sunday, July 10, the day the NYPD shot and injured yet another Black man in Flatbush, Paul Mathurin, Black, white and Latin PL’ers talked with community members, sold CHALLENGEs and made contacts. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Mathurin and refused to believe the bosses’ lies that he was waving a gun. The struggle to unite our class advances every day.
The worldwide working class, led by Progressive Labor Party, must persevere to build a mass, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement. We must struggle against frustration and cynicism. We must stay the course with both communist urgency and communist patience. There are no shortcuts to revolution.
The bosses will never give up state power voluntarily. We need millions to join us worldwide and take it from them. Join PLP, and fight back!

BATON ROUGE, LA, JULY 10—After Alton Sterling was murdered by the kkkops, Black workers carried out nightly protests. When the Progressive Labor Party heard this, we mobilized a multiracial group mainly women to go to Baton Rouge. Women, among them mothers who left child-rearing duties with their husbands, led the PLP group. The goal was to learn from our working class sisters and brothers and instill revolutionary communist politics into the fightback.
Sterling’s murder was no accident. As one Black worker told PL, “The police who shot him knew him. Knew who he was. These were the same police that always patrol the neighborhood. They knew what they were doing.” The kkkops who murdered Sterling were doing their jobs under capitalism: serving the bosses and terrorizing the working class.
Black workers in Louisiana, as elsewhere, feel the cutting edge of racism the deepest. The state of Louisiana has the third highest unemployment rate in the U.S.
Baton Rouge, the state capitol, ranked first in the U.S. for HIV and AIDS case rates in 2013. The vast majority of these cases are in the segregated Black working class neighborhood of north Baton Rouge, where one-third of Black workers live below the official poverty line, and where Black men had a 46 percent high school graduation rate (New York Times, 7/11/16). New Orleans, only less than two hours away, is where in 2005, the capitalist disaster Hurricane Katrina and Rita sideswiped the city, and the bosses abandoned over 100,000 Black workers in New Orleans, murdering over 1,000.
Workers, Youth, Reds Turn Up
PLP joined a demonstration at steps of the state capital building. A multiracial crowd of over 1,000 workers was quietly listening to prayers and speeches given by a church group. PL’ers led chants on the bullhorn as the crowd began marching. The responses chants and CHALLENGE newspaper sales were militant and enthusiastic. Within minutes, the PL’ers became the leadership of the whole march.
A teenage girl asked if she could be on the mic. She then led us in chanting, “No justice, no peace! No racist police!” The unity of the workers and their anger were palpable.
One Black woman worker, infected by identity politics, told a white woman PL’er she shouldn’t lead the chants. The comrade responded by arguing for multiracial unity—this fight belongs to the whole working class. This Black worker insisted there were “already too many white people.”
But the other Black workers in the crowd weren’t having it—they told the comrade not to ignore the nationalist. Everyone continued chanting, “Black and white—shut it down, Asian and Latin—shut it down, woman and men, shut it down, with multi-racial unity—shut it down! The PL’er was judged and respected by her antiracist politics, not her skin color.
Misleaders Pacify, Reds Electrify Workers
The deadly trap of identity politics, especially Black Nationalism, is robust in the boss-funded Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—liberal white billionaire George Soros, best known for exporting capitalist “democracy” and diverting workers’ fightback into support for U.S. imperialism, has gifted BLM with millions of dollars (Washington Times, 1/24/15). Black nationalism serve the bosses by blaming white workers for capitalism’s racist horror house, instead of instead of fighting the bosses and building for revolution.
Consider the mass leadership provided by multiracial mainly-women communists in Baton Rouge. When boss-serving misleaders aimed to pacify workers and remain in a church parking lot, a vocal PLP Black woman worker on the bullhorn electrified the crowd and inspired them to take to the streets.
They took the streets and ran up against cops with guns and riot gear. A local worker called the PL’ers to warn of the police’s plan to use tear gas. Since this particular balance of forces wasn’t in the workers’ favor, PLP and friends tactically retreated, warned the crowd of the cops, and regrouped.
The police drove a car into the remaining crowd and separated it. They made arrests, grabbing people by the necks and throwing some over fences.
Cops know how to take advantage of a disorganized march. PLP was able to sharpen the politics of the workers’ anger. Comrades and friends work collectively to sharpen the fight. But, PL’ers also followed the leadership of workers.
The identity politics of groups like BLM purposefully drive a wedge in working class unity, while drawing in many honest antiracist workers and youth. PLP fights for the international working class to unite under communist leadership and smash this racist profit system.
From Baton Rouge To Every Continent: Build A Mass PLP!
In Baton Rouge, and in 27 countries, PLP is learning to fight and fighting to learn to build a mass communist movement to seize state power. The workers of Baton Rouge are angry and fed up. They are angry and frustrated with this racist system and its lack of jobs, its closings of schools and hospitals, and its unending police terror. They want real leadership and are open to communism. Although they are calling for the firing of the police chief and mayor, many understand that whoever takes over will continue to oversee racist terror on our class. Many also see past the nationalist lies that putting more Black people in ruling-class positions will improve the conditions of Black workers. Baton Rouge’s mayor, Kip Holden, is Black and as many workers in Baton Rouge put it, “he is nowhere to be seen.”
Workers can learn many lessons during these increasing surges of class struggle as the capitalist system exposes its inherently racist and violent nature. The bosses use their state power to exploit workers for profits, super-exploit some with racist terror, and send the workers’ youth to fight in imperialist wars. It is the job of communists to build international working class consciousness. In fighting back, the working class gains confidence that it can build a communist society based on the needs of the working class. From Baton Rouge to every continent: JOIN PLP!