WASHINGTON, DC, January 31 — After prodding from the richest man in Congress, Darrell Issa of California, who heads the colonial committee overseeing the District of Columbia, the U.S. Park Police are moving against Occupy DC at McPherson Square. Several people have been arrested, including one who was unjustifiably tasered by the cops and a PL’er who is falsely charged with assault on a police officer and resisting arrest. Occupiers have erected a giant tent over the statue of General McPherson (a Civil War hero) and are preparing for an attack by Park Police. Stay tuned!

When slavery in the U.S. was finally abolished in the mid-1800s as a result of the Civil War, the problems of formerly enslaved Africans did not end. Capitalist-inspired racist ideology helped enable the bosses to exploit black labor to a higher degree than it did white labor. Prison chain gangs were fed by arbitrary arrests and convictions, injustices cloaked by Jim Crow laws. The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution that purported to end slavery contains the following loophole:  “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States….[Emphasis added — ed.]

“Crimes” used to justify imprisonment and enslavement after the formal end to slavery included vagrancy (essentially unemployment), which was so vaguely defined that any black man could be convicted of it.  Much the same happens today with arrests and convictions for drug “crimes.”  One key aspect to this sham of justice, then and now, was that state legislatures and Congress define many offenses as crimes without victims — no victims, that is, other than the person arrested. Among victimless crimes, possession of drugs is the contemporary equivalent to vagrancy.

With the skyrocketing of the U.S. prison population in recent decades, beginning with the political manipulation of “crime in the streets” by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and escalating with the “War on Drugs” under Ronald Reagan, a huge proportion of black workers — mainly men — have been re-enslaved.  In Chicago, for example, 55 percent of adult black men have felony records.  Overall, black men in the U.S. are incarcerated more than six times the rate for white men. They have a one-in-four chance of being jailed during their lifetimes; and one in fourteen are in jail or prison at any one time (see PLP pamphlet “Prison Labor: Fascism U.S. Style”). 

The U.S. prison population, the largest in the world, is 70 percent black and Latino in a country where black and Latino people represent only 29 percent of the population. Latino workers are also imprisoned far out of proportion to their share of the population. The vast majority are behind bars for non-violent violations of drug laws, which were deliberately designed to turn a medical problem into a criminal act. Contrary to capitalist propaganda, however, the proportions of black and white workers who use or deal in drugs, is approximately the same, between 6 and 7 percent. 

Of late, the label of “drug criminal” is increasingly and falsely applied to Latino immigrants, the vast majority of whom come to the U.S. to find jobs that have been destroyed in their native countries by U.S. corporations. In the drive for maximum profit, corporate capital moves south across Latin America and dispossesses millions of rural workers of their land and livelihoods. This creates an army of unemployed workers who are available for the ever-shifting needs of global corporations.

Today’s equivalents to the slave drivers’ guns and whips are the police, courts, jails and prisons. After Congress upgraded drug charges from misdemeanors to felonies, convictions or forced plea bargains for drug possession leave people ineligible for the rest of their lives for food stamps, public housing, and — in practice — from most jobs. This in turn all but destroys the opportunity to have and love a family. No other country brands drug possessors as felons or imprisons them for victimless “crimes” at anywhere near the rate in the U.S.  

Although chain gangs were abolished in the early 1900s, the entire working class remains bound to this day to the capitalist class. Chattel slavery (enforced by chain, whip, and gun) has simply been replaced by wage, debt and prison slavery, where workers are chained to their jobs by the underlying threat of homelessness and starvation. Immediately after the Civil War, black and white sharecroppers were primarily bound by debt slavery; they incurred financial obligations to their landlords that they could never pay off. In today’s financial crisis, mortgages, rent, and credit card debt play a similar role. In place of the slave driver and bounty hunter, the banks and large property owners force us to do the capitalists’ bidding. 

The racist inequalities of capitalism injure all workers. According to a study by economist Michael Reich, the places in the U.S. where wage differentials between white and black workers are greatest are also the places where the wages for all workers are lowest. The capitalists need racism to justify the super-exploitation of certain groups of workers. Racism is also the capitalists’ main tool to divide the working class — both in the reform struggle for higher wages and better working and living conditions, and in the revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism altogether. In fighting back against racism, workers are laying the indispensable foundation for a communist revolution and a communist world.

References

Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, NY, 2010.

Beckett, Katherine, and Sasson, Theodore, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2004.

Blackmon, Douglas, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Doubleday, NY, 2008.

Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A., American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993.

Perkinson, Robert, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Metropolitan Books, NY, 2010.

WASHINGTON, DC, January  25 — For more than two months, the Criminal Injustice Committee (CIC) of the Occupy DC movement has been battling the Wells Fargo bank to stop its support of the racist private prison system. In mid-December, more than 100 occupiers protested at the Wells Fargo branch in the mainly black Shaw neighborhood. Every Friday afternoon since then, a team of occupiers has leafleted there to urge its customers to close their accounts. Recently the CIC has expanded its boycott activities to a second branch office in Columbia Heights, where many black and Latino workers live.

On January 24, a second demonstration was held there in solidarity with protests at the Florida meeting of financiers involved with the GEO private prison company. The CIC also marched in the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade on January 22. The black working-class onlookers gave a rousing cheer to our “Jobs not jails!” chant, and quickly took all of our leaflets and CHALLENGEs.  

The capitalist system requires and reinforces racist institutions in order to maintain social control and maximize its profits (see “Smash Racism: A Fighter’s Manual” at www.plp.org). Capitalism systematically ensures the super-exploitation of African American workers by criminalizing and marginalizing them in what has been called the New Jim Crow (see adjoining article).

More than 60,000 DC residents have criminal records, mostly due to the bogus, racist “war on drugs.” The majority are jailed not for new crimes but for parole violations that are almost impossible to avoid. Half of those with criminal records are unemployed because it is lawful to discriminate against individuals for prior convictions. Wages and working conditions are driven down for these workers, and ultimately for all workers, as a result of this massive branding of black workers.

A similar institutional process is apparent for Latino immigrants, who face intense harassment, unjust jailings, and massive deportations. In the last three years, more than a million immigrants have been forced out of the U.S. under Barack Obama’s accelerated deportation proceedings. Meanwhile, 35,000 individuals are held in camps under the expansion of mandatory civil detention for non-citizens by Obama’s liberal predecessor, Bill Clinton, in 1996.

The surge in detention has resulted in horrid conditions, including grossly inadequate health care, physical and sexual abuse, and overcrowding. One Latino worker pressed a twenty-dollar bill in our hand to support our work against detention centers. We learned that his entire family was being held with no end in sight.

The Wells Fargo campaign is merely one element of the attack on the criminal justice system and by extension the entire capitalist system. Why Wells Fargo?  All banks are ruthless. But Wells Fargo in particular profits from its extensive business with the GEO Group, the second largest private prison owner, and second to none in its brutality towards incarcerated individuals. Wells Fargo is GEO’s largest investor (owning more than $100 million in stock) and serves as its underwriter, broker and financial advisor. 

At the Rivers Correctional Facility in Winton, NC, GEO incarcerates nearly a thousand residents of the District of Columbia. CIC members have met many former Rivers inmates with horror stories to tell, from snakes in the toilets (from the adjacent swamp) to negligent health care (one doctor for 1,300 inmates) to physical and psychological damage. As a profit-maximizing private facility, Rivers refuses to spend enough to provide decent food, health care, education, or job training. The truth, however, is that all prisons, public or private, are vicious tools of capitalist oppression. They must be smashed through revolutionary action.

During weekly CIC meetings, PL’ers have argued that the anti-racist Well Fargo boycott campaign will require more participation by the industrial working class to gain clout. While quite a few Wells Fargo customers have told us that they have already closed their accounts, more force is needed to pressure the bank and also to broaden the campaign. PL’ers have invited other CIC members to join the Party’s regular distribution of anti-racist and communist literature to bus drivers, an effort to gain transit workers’ support for this campaign. PL’ers have also made clear, through discussions and the distribution of CHALLENGE, that only by building a revolutionary PLP, smashing capitalism, and replacing it with a communist system can the New Jim Crow be defeated.

MINNEAPOLIS, January 28 — In international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters of Tahir Square and our fellow anti-capitalists in Athens, London, Paris and Rome, the Minnesota Occupiers held Occupy Space Day in Minneapolis. It was thrilling!

A contingent of 70 demonstrators marched through the Steven Square and Eliot Park downtown neighborhoods protesting income inequality and housing evictions. Minneapolis has one of the Midwest’s highest eviction rates, after Chicago. Our demonstrators were men and women, black, white and bi-racial, union activists, workers and college students. While many were reformist in outlook, many others were anti-capitalists.

The kkkops harassed us initially but left before the march’s main event. In Eliot Park where the march ended there was an anti-capitalist speech declaring international solidarity with our working-class brothers and sisters in Egypt and with other global protestors against racist, imperialist capitalism.

The speech was in front of an abandoned church that Hennepin County declared county property. An unused church could be used as a workers’ cultural community center. However, the county bosses want to hold onto it rather than give it to workers, so we took it!

One speaker declared, “We take this property in the name of the Minneapolis oppressed!” The doors were forced open and we had a party! We held it for one hour before the cops gave us 15 minutes to clear out or be arrested. We all left together, orderly and disciplined.

Despite that outcome it was a small victory because workers are slowly learning we don’t have to take oppression, that we can collectively fight back. Workers took all the CHALLENGES I had. Personally the march and occupation made me think of the 1871 Paris Commune and the 1968 general strike in France.

This is a great time to be alive because the PLP will show millions of workers globally the revolutionary path to communism! 

Minnesota Red