As the Movement for Black Lives gathers for its founding convention in Cleveland, its rank-and-file stands at a fork in the road. If they follow the Movement’s leadership and splinter into a Black group with non-Black “allies,” they will move onto the dead-end path of nationalism and reformism—and, inevitably, into the capitalist bosses’ camp. From Haiti and Indonesia to South Africa and the Congo, from Vietnam’s National Liberation Front to the Black Panther Party in the U.S. (see CHALLENGE, p. 6), nationalism has derailed workers’ revolts and led them to death and exploitation by a new set of bosses.
By dividing us, nationalism conquers us.
But there is another choice for all workers: Black, Latin, Asian and white. It is the path of multiracial unity of the international working class, the only force that can end racism and ultimately smash capitalism with communist revolution. Progressive Labor Party is taking that path. Over the last fifty years, we have built a multiracial movement and fought racism and sexism in the streets, in factories and hospitals, in schools and colleges (see CHALLENGE, p. 8). Struggle has taught us there are no good bosses, regardless of color or nationalist identification. The latest wave of rebellion keeps teaching us that multiracial unity is indispensable and non-negotiable.
Black Lives Matter, Plus and Minus
As a leading element in the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter is faced with a contradiction—with a progressive appearance masking a pro-capitalist essence. Founded by three women after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2013, the group has recognized both the special oppression of women and the role Black women have played as a driving force in workers’ struggles. It has helped to galvanize thousands of honest, anti-racist workers and youth—of all “races”—to the resistance against murders-by-cop. Black workers’ militant struggle has reverberated from Ferguson to Brazil to London to Israel; a global movement now looks to the U.S. Black working class for leadership. These are all very positive things.
But Black Lives Matter is fatally compromised by its capitalist ideas. Its emphasis on identity politics caters to capitalist individualism over working-class consciousness. The group has taken millions of dollars from its most notorious “ally,” liberal billionaire George Soros, who is best known for exporting capitalist “democracy” and diverting workers’ fightback into support for U.S. imperialism. As the Washington Times noted, “Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign” (1/24/15).
Black Nationalism: Just Another Jail
Class collaboration with the bosses works hand in hand with nationalist ideology. On its website, Black Lives Matter declares that it “goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities.” Then it proceeds to call itself “a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.”
But Black workers don’t need a new Black liberation movement; the old one gave rise to pro-boss sellouts like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. What’s needed is an alternative to a capitalist system that uses racism to super-exploit Black workers for super-profits—and to divide Black and white workers who need each other to bring the system down.
Like all workers, Black workers need communism, a system organized around workers’ needs. A society where the basis of racism and sexism—exploitation and inequality—will join the bosses in the dustbin of history.
Despite his reformist flaws, Martin Luther King understood how nationalism and separation play into the bosses’ hands, and how they undermine our class’s common goal of a society organized around workers’ needs. In his 1965 address at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, he said:
“Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then….[T]he segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”
After the Civil War, King noted, as the poor white masses and former Black slaves moved to unite politically, the Southern ruling class “began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society….Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy….They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level.”
In a reference to the legalized segregation in the South known as Jim Crow, King added: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”
Let’s not do the bosses’ job for them. Let’s stay united, Black and white, Asian and Latin, as we fight together against racism and for a communist world!
THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS, July 2 — Three days of rebellion broke out after the kkkops murdered a Black tourist. The uprising in Ferguson, Missouri has spread beyond the borders of the U.S., setting the tone for a militant fight against global racist terror aimed at Black workers.
A multiracial group of young workers, out to enjoy a concert, witnessed the brutal murder. They saw the cops charge a concert-goer named Mitch Henriquez. Subsequently, five of the kkkops pinned Mitch down and choked him to death on the street. The workers responded immediately, organizing a march that turned into a battle with the police. When the Rebels cornered one group of police, the cops had to fire live warning shots at the crowd to escape justice. For three days the country’s largest city, Amsterdam, was shut down as rebels kept battling the kkkops.
These anti-racist, multiracial rebellions are inspiring our working-class sisters and brothers to realize our potential to defeat our oppressors and their racist system. Battles like these teach us how to fight and build unity for war. The next step in our battle is for workers to join the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and the movement to create a new world run by and for workers, not the ruling-class parasites.
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PLP History: Anti-Racism at Forefront of Communist Fightback
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To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of Progressive Labor Party, CHALLENGE is publishing a series of articles on our Party’s history, from its origins as the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) to its presence today in more than two dozen countries worldwide. This is the second part of an article on PLP’s historic fights against racism. The previous part discussed the Harlem Rebellion and PLP’s leadership in fomenting it.
The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 raised the fight against racist oppression to a new level while exposing the class treason of Black reformist leadership. After Harlem, more than 100 cities in the U.S. felt the torch of rebellion. PL’s leadership in this struggle set the tone for our unceasing fight against racism:
From the 1970s to the current day, PL’ers have organized hundreds of attacks on the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis wherever they spread their racist garbage. Rejecting the pacifist mythology that these gutter racists would fade away if ignored, we have attacked them head-on—and confronted the capitalists’ cops who protect them. We have mounted these anti-racist, multiracial actions in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Detroit and St. Louis. We’ve done the same in smaller communities like Tupelo, Mississippi; Scotland, Connecticut; Jamesburg and Morristown, New Jersey; and scores of cities and towns in California. We invaded the Nazis’ headquarters in Chicago. We beat a white supremacist leader in a Boston television interview. These militant anti-KKK/Nazi actions have involved an estimated 100,000 or more workers and youth.
On May Day, 1975, we mobilized 2,500 anti-racists in Boston to march against the segregationist, terrorist organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights, accurately nicknamed Racists On A Rampage). When they physically attacked us, we routed them. We subsequently organized a summer project to combat ROAR’s mob violence and its anti-busing racism. We integrated formerly all-white beaches, held anti-racist summer schools for Black children, and rallied to escort Black children into their first day of integrating formerly all-white schools. Our efforts smashed ROAR. 
On May Day, 1976, we marched into Chicago’s Marquette Park, where Nazis had barred Black people. We integrated that neighborhood.
Simultaneously, PLP exposed academic charlatans — like E.O. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein, and Arthur Jensen — who spewed racist filth about the “inferiority” of Black workers and the Nazi fantasy that unemployment was inherited in their genes. We mobilized demonstrations wherever these racists appeared, chased them off auditorium stages, and even poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head in the middle of a lecture. (Our member called out, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) PL’s position was clear and uncompromising: No free speech for racists.
Throughout this period, PLP helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass anti-racist, multiracial group that led many of these struggles.
In Southern California, our Party has organized against the anti-immigrant Minute Men. We have gone to border towns to fight racist attacks on immigrant workers from Mexico, rallying support from citizen workers around the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
More recently, PL’ers have taken to the streets in Brooklyn and Los Angeles to protest the police murders of Black women, men, and youth by racist cops.
Currently, PLP is advancing the protest against the cops’ murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. We are raising our slogan — “Fight Like Ferguson!” — among thousands across the country. Our Party is building a movement for rebellion against racist police terror, not pacifist appeals to ruling-class officials from Barack Obama’s Justice Department on down. We are doing the same in solidarity with workers and youth in Baltimore who are outraged by the cops’ murder of Freddie Gray.
Anti-Racism on the Shop Floor
PLP has consistently raised the issue of racism among organized workers to unite them against the bosses’ racist attacks. In 1973, when a New York City Police Department undercover cop shot a Black 10-year-old in the back in Queens, a PLP club at the Ford auto plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, brought the atrocity onto the factory assembly line. Our Party petitioned the do-nothing union local leadership to take a public stance and demand that the cop be indicted for murder. The workers’ response was electric. They were galvanized into action during a contract struggle that previously had been limited to economic issues. Their heightened political consciousness and militancy led to a weeklong wildcat strike against 100-degree temperatures in the plant, which in turn set the tone for the Chrysler Mack Avenue sit-down strike two months later (see CHALLENGE, May 6).
Beginning in the 1980’s, PLP has provided anti-racist leadership to 6,000 Washington, DC Metro transit workers. At one point, the local’s overwhelmingly Black membership elected a white PL’er as their president, defeating a passive Black incumbent. As Metro bosses exclude people convicted of crimes by the rulers’ criminal injustice system, they close one of the few avenues for many Black workers to obtain a decent-paying job. PLP has demanded that the union oppose racist background checks. Many workers have been won to our Party in this anti-racist fight.
Fighting Racism Internationally
PLP is now actively organizing on five continents.
In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, with tens of thousands still living in tents, we have spread the struggle against U.S. imperialism and racism, which have enslaved workers there for two centuries.
In Israel-Palestine, PL’ers are exposing and fighting the intense racism of the Israeli bosses (with U.S. ruling-class support) against workers from Africa and Palestine, who are victims of super-exploitation. We are also organizing workers against the Israeli rulers’ mass evictions of villages inhabited by Palestinians.
In Pakistan, PL’ers are mobilizing thousands of workers to fight racist super-exploitation by Pakistani bosses in alliance with U.S. imperialism. The bosses have slaughtered thousands in sweatshops and in Obama’s drone attacks.
These are only a few highlights of PLP’s long fight against racism, the ideological foundation of the profit system. The struggle against racism will prepare our class to overthrow capitalism and obliterate exploitation and divisions among workers. It is the watchword of our Party.
Superficially, McFarland USA is another movie in a long line of “feel good” stories of sports teams (typically made up of Black, Latin or Asian students) up against impossible odds, who somehow overcome them and emerge victorious (frequently with the help of a tough but caring white coach). The film details the story of the McFarland (California) High School cross-country team. The team did not even exist until 1987, when a seemingly washed-up, volatile coach who had been fired from a job in Boise, Idaho, arrives in McFarland with his family to take a job as a health and physical education teacher at the high school.
The coach, Jim White (played by Kevin Costner and sarcastically called “blanco” by his amused working-class Mexican students), soon realizes that the difficult working lives of his students require them to run everywhere. They run after class from the school to the fields to help their families pick cabbages and oranges. To get to work on time, they run on weekend mornings to reach the trucks that would otherwise take off without them. Smelling success, he organizes a cross-country squad of seven young men from his PE class.
The team is the victim of racist and anti-working class jibes ( which White never takes on) from all-white teams from rich suburbs like Palo Alto. They place last in their first big meet because the other schools sports’ budgets give them the ability to practice in the mountainous areas that are frequently the meet sites, and the McFarland runners have run only on level tracks. So White has them practice running up and down mounds of almond shells near the fields. After months of hard practicing, an inspirational speech by White telling them why their working-class lives make their team tougher than anyone else around, and a tremendous team effort, they win the state championship and silence the smart-mouth sons of the petty bourgeoisie.
Great, right? But things aren’t always what they seem to be. First, White and his family have a racist outlook when they arrive in McFarland, his daughter asking “We’re going to live in this dump?” White and his family stereotype the working-class youth as gangbangers who drive their noisy, low-riding cars through town at night for fun. When his oldest daughter (who later falls in love with one of the team members) is injured while with the team during a late-night run-in with other youth who attack them, White immediately assumes his team members are at fault. In fact, they risked their own safety to protect his daughter. But these reactions from the movie’s hero are made to seem innocent and natural.
Perhaps the emotional center of the movie is the singing of the U.S. national anthem by the players of all the teams just before the championship run. The camera pans White and all the McFarland players, their families and supporters proudly joining in. The message is clear: immigrant workers have just as much to feel loyal to as their suburban counterparts. This is also the message of the DREAM Act, the law that encourages immigrant youth to enlist in the U.S. military to obtain legal status.
Movie Ignores Local Fightback
The movie shows nothing about the fightback of farmworkers against the horrendous working conditions they face. This reviewer participated in two Progressive Labor Party Summer Projects in McFarland, Delano and other California towns around the time of the events described in the movie. There was a sharp struggle in the fields over low wages, long working hours, and the criminal use of dangerous pesticides by the growers, all of which grew out of a capitalist system which must produce food and other commodities for profit, not human need. McFarland and other towns in the San Joaquin Valley saw openly communist-led union organizing of farmworkers for the first time since the 1930s and ‘40s.
Starting in 1984, McFarland also became the center of a cluster of child leukemia cases. Rank-and-file farmworkers, with help from local researchers, were able to show that the most likely cause for these cancers was the gradual downward seepage of pesticides into the soil and then into the water supply. PLP and InCAR organized a campaign to put the growers’ profit motives on trial for the death of our young brothers and sisters. We pointed out the role of U.S. imperialism in forcing immigrant workers to choose between crossing the border and working under these dangerous conditions, and facing mass unemployment and starvation in their countries of birth.
The lesson of McFarland, USA is that, under capitalism, the media can never honestly address issues like exploitation, racism and sexism. That is because mass culture is run by money (for corporations like Disney, which made this movie), and inevitably reflects the dominant bourgeois ideology. So what we get instead is feel-good pap meant to mislead honest, anti-racist workers into supporting dangerous pro-boss ideas like patriotism. After a communist revolution, artistic creation will serve the working class by promoting communist values of class love and solidarity in the struggle for a world without borders, profits and exploitation.
A cockroach named Dylann Roof pulled the trigger at Emanuel AME Church. But capitalism aimed the gun. Capitalism murdered nine people in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17—nine more victims to add to the millions of workers killed each year by callous starvation, preventable disease, environmental toxins, a profit-crazed pharmaceutical industry, missing medical care, mad-dog police, and imperialist war.
And, in particular, by racism.
The foundation of U.S. capital consists of two centuries of Black enslavement and another century and a half of super-exploitation of Black and Latin and immigrant workers. To justify these super-profits of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and protect their organized crime, the capitalist bosses rely on racist ideology. This ranges from the pseudo-science of “intelligence” testing—and the bogus concept of “race” itself—to Barack Obama calling the Baltimore rebels “thugs,” the contemporary n-word. To beat back revolt against their oppressive profit system, the rulers resort to state terror: the mass incarceration and legalized lynching of young Black men and women by the bosses’ cops. (See CHALLENGE, page 4.)
Following Racist Leaders
Dylann Roof was both a product and an instrument of this racist, ruling-class agenda. In his online manifesto, Roof said he was “radicalized” by the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a wannabe cop.
He was influenced by the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, an offshoot of the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1950s and ‘60s that harassed and assaulted civil rights workers in the South. (Essentially an open version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Citizens Councils’ membership included Congressmen, state legislators, newspaper publishers and editors, and the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.)
Given Roof’s gutter leanings, he was no doubt inspired by the recent onslaught of murders-by-cop, the cold-blooded killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Shantel Davis and too many others to mention. When the bosses’ police and courts declare open season on Black workers and youth, vigilante scum follow their lead.
Sometimes these atrocities are useful to the ruling class. By distorting the events through their corporate media, the capitalists use them to intimidate workers and feed racist stereotypes. They can try to turn us against one another. They know the one force that can destroy them is a unified, multiracial working class with revolutionary communist leadership. Without racism to divide the world’s workers, there aren’t enough bombs in the world to keep the bosses afloat—or alive.
Terrorists, Big and Small
But sometimes the little terrorists go too far. Sometimes they threaten the rulers’ overriding strategy to recruit enough reliable soldiers for the next big war over Middle Eastern oil, against Russia or China or both. Then the big terrorists slap the little ones down, in a desperate attempt to retain workers’ allegiance and hold open rebellion at bay.
That’s what happened in Ferguson, when the U.S. Attorney General rushed to the scene and launched a civil rights investigation. It happened in Baltimore, when the injustice system was compelled to indict six cops after the brutal in-custody execution of Freddie Gray. It just happened again in Charleston, when politicians of both parties and all stripes joined the liberal national media in condemning Roof and declaring that the Confederate battle flag must go.
In a time of intense partisanship and ruling-class dysfunction, the dominant finance capital wing has used the Charleston massacre to unite and discipline its ranks. News of campaign donations from the Council of Conservative Citizens discredited three Republicans presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum. All are close allies of Charles and David Koch, the Kansas billionaires with huge investments in the domestic U.S. oil industry—and little interest in going to a war to defend ExxonMobil’s profits in Iraq or Saudi Arabia. The three candidates were exposed because the biggest U.S. bosses—represented by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Jeb Bush, among others—don’t trust their leadership in the next global conflict.
Workers Have But One Flag
The Confederate flag is an abomination. It stands for slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the most brutal, unspeakable oppression of men, women, and children. It should be shredded and burned wherever it is found. But the Confederacy had nothing to do with the genocidal slaughter of millions of people in the Vietnam War, or the half a million children killed by U.S. sanctions against Iraq, or the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians incinerated by atomic bombs in World War II. These genocidal crimes were committed by the side that won the Civil War, by finance capital, under the most feared and despicable banner in the world today: the U.S. flag.
Workers have no nation. National flags can lead them only in the wrong direction. Flags fuel conflict among workers wherever capitalists are at odds: in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in Israel and Palestine. The international working class has only one flag—the red flag of communist revolution. The Progressive Labor Party has carried that flag for fifty years in our fight against racist terror and for a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs. We hold the red flag high in two dozen countries. Join us!
