The mass racist killings on August 5 by a neo-Nazi veteran in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was not an isolated atrocity. When Wade Michael Page murdered six people and wounded three others in a Sikh temple, he reflected both the long-term needs and contradictions of U.S. imperialism. As the U.S. ruling class proceeds on its collision course with rising capitalists in China over the world’s oil and gas and cheap labor, its murderous brutality will victimize workers at home, as well. 

The ex-GI’s crime exposes a serious flaw in the U.S. war machine, where racism cuts two ways. On the one hand, the top brass needs racism to motivate troops to kill dehumanized enemies. On the other, racism hinders U.S. bosses’ ability to mobilize for ever-larger wars that will inevitably become global.

A substantial number of U.S. troops share Page’s virulent hatred for black, Latino and Asian soldiers and superiors. Some racist officers refuse even to recognize Barack Obama as commander-in-chief. Racist “hazing” (actually torture) discourages working-class Asians from enlisting. Moreover, the extreme racism rampant in the U.S. — police killings of black and Latino youth in big cities nation-wide; double jobless rates for these groups; turning their schools into prison-like institutions; their mass incarceration (70 percent of prisoners in the U.S. are black and Latino); the massive deportation of immigrant workers — all deter black and Latino youth from joining the military.

Throw in the two Middle East shooting wars over the last decade, and it’s no surprise that black recruitment plummeted 58 percent between 2000 and 2007, despite the patriotic frenzy following 9/11. And Page’s anti-Sikh rampage further dampens Pentagon hopes that tens of millions of U.S.-led Indian troops will join a potential future battle against China’s vast forces.

The bosses’ dilemma is that capitalism can’t live without racism. The lower wages and benefits paid to black and Latino workers net U.S. bosses hundreds of billions in super-profits, which the capitalists depend on for their very existence. These inequities hurt white workers as well, because they’re used as a club to keep white workers from demanding more or even keeping what they’ve got. The differential is designed to split the working class and weaken its ability to unite to fight the bosses’ attacks.

As the U.S. president, it is Obama’s job to enforce the capitalists’ profit system that wages its economic war on the entire working class. Obama’s racism may be less overt than Wade Page’s, but it is no less dangerous to workers.

The one way for the working class to rid itself of this racist profit system is to join and build the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party in organizing a communist revolution. Communism unites all workers and eliminates bosses, profits, and the wage system that divides us. It enables our class to share all the value that workers — and only workers — produce.

Racists in the Military

In the run-up to the 2001 Afghan and 2003 Iraq invasions, Pentagon chiefs worried openly over the dubious loyalty of racists like Page and how they hurt enlistment figures. They were right on both counts. In 1995, Page was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when two neo-Nazi soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division killed a black couple in nearby Fayetteville. Page himself belonged to a neo-Nazi group. The Army punished him for dereliction of duty and going AWOL.

As Togo D. West, Jr., the former black Secretary of the Army, once said, “Extremist activity compromises fairness, good order and discipline and, potentially, combat effectiveness” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 8/6/12). Yet West’s Army routinely teaches and trains recruits using racist slurs to wipe out “hajis” and “ragheads.”  

In 2010, Lt. Col. Terry Larkin, an Army doctor, refused orders for Afghanistan because he challenged the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency. The year before, Maj. Stefan Rhodes did the same thing, while Capt. Connie Rhodes rejected deployment to Iraq. All three tried to cover their gutter racism with the “birther” argument, the spurious idea that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and therefore is ineligible to be president. 

But regardless of his color, Obama must enforce racism to serve his master capitalists. He has deported more immigrant workers than any other president. He endorses education policies that perpetuate racist schools. Racist unemployment and housing foreclosures have soared on his watch.

Tea Party Challenges the Dominant Power Structure

The Tea Party represents domestic bosses with less of a vested interest in imperialist wars. Its dubious loyalty to the dominant power structure makes it a threat to the liberal, imperialist, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. In 2010, a U.S. Army training document envisioned the use of troops on U.S. soil under the following scenario: 

In May 2016 an extremist [read “racist” — Ed.] militia motivated by the goals of the “tea party” movement takes over the government of Darlington, South Carolina, occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council, and placing the mayor under house arrest. Activists remove the chief of police and either disarm local police and county sheriff departments or discourage them from interfering. In truth, this is hardly necessary. Many law enforcement officials already are sympathetic to the tea party’s agenda, know many of the people involved, and have made clear they will not challenge the takeover.  

U.S.-India Tie Strained

In the wake of the Milwaukee bloodbath, the bosses’ pressing concern is that it could set back the Pentagon’s dream of a grand war alliance with India against China’s vast forces. On August 1, after returning from India, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton D. Carter reported back to the ultra-imperialist, Rockefeller-founded Asia Society: “India is a key part of our rebalance to the Asia-Pacific, and, we believe, to the broader security and prosperity of the 21st century. The U.S.-India relationship is global in scope…. Our security interests converge” (Times of India, 8/2/12). “Rebalance” refers to Obama’s new anti-China military build-up. Carter vowed “to work with the Indians on developing a joint vision for U.S.-India defense cooperation.”

But this plan may be compromised by Page’s slaughter. “Sikhs make up 10-15% of all ranks in the Indian Army and 20% of its officers, while Sikhs form only 1.87% of the Indian population, which makes them possibly 10 times more likely to be a soldier and officer in the Indian Army than the average Indian.” (BBC, 8/8/07). In fact, India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh is a Sikh.

Ravi Srinivasan, a Hindu, West Point graduate, and veteran of Afghanistan, lamented how Page may have strained U.S. alliances:

Diversity is a force multiplier on the front lines. It offers a means to relate to… our coalition partners…. Whether or not Page’s military record had any effect on his racist views, the fact that he is a veteran makes him an ambassador for the military….[T]he next time we invade a country, the consequences of that perception may follow us there (New York Times, 8/7/02).

Rulers’ Achilles Heel

These are problems that racism, an essential component of capitalism, poses for the capitalists themselves. Even as the bosses use racism to exploit and divide workers, it will prove to be the rulers’ Achilles heel. The imperialist war machine’s racist outrages and atrocities sparked widespread militant revolts during the U.S. genocide in Vietnam (see box). With communist leadership, such rebellions could lay the groundwork for destroying the deadly profit system.

The fight against racism needs to start in the belly of the beast, here in the U.S. That has been a cardinal principle of the Progressive Labor Party since our inception half a century ago, as shown by our active support of the 1964 Harlem Rebellion. Our Party has joined the current fight against the racist police murders of Shantel Davis and Ramarley Graham in New York and the racist executions of Manual Diaz and Joel Acevedo in Anaheim, California. PLP mobilizes the working class in the workplace and the unions, the military, the communities, and the churches. It fights racism on college campuses and attacks Jim Crow segregation in Brooklyn’s high schools. The Party’s anti-racist struggles help unite our class as a prerequisite for communist revolution.

As our Party has grown and expanded onto five continents, we have spread our anti-racist fight to opposing mass evictions in Palestine-Israel and uniting all ethnic groups in Pakistan and Mexico as well as other areas (see pages 3,4,5). 

Join this international class struggle. Organize class war against capitalism. Join and build
Progressive Labor Party!

U.S. rulers’ worries over the Pentagon’s ability to field a reliable military harkens back to the mass GI rebellion during the Vietnam War. Writing in the June 1971 Armed Forces Journal, Col. Robert Heinl, a Marine historian, described it as “The Collapse of the Armed Forces.” And it was a massive collapse:

• Heinl reported that sedition “infests the Armed Services….There appear to be some 144 underground newspapers…at U.S. military bases in this country and overseas.”

• “Fragging” — the hurling of fragmentation grenades at officers — was common. GI’s raised bounties of up to $1,000 for leaders they wanted to rub out. Requests were published in the GIs’ underground papers. GI Says publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on the lieutenant colonel who led the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in 1969. In 1970 alone, the Pentagon reported 209 fraggings.

• In October, when the USS Kitty Hawk was ordered to return to the Philippines’ Subic Bay, black sailors led a major rebellion, including hand-to-hand battle with Marines sent to break up a meeting on board. The ship was forced to retire to San Francisco for a “6-month re-fitting job” and was removed from the war altogether.

• By November 1972, five giant aircraft carriers were tied up in San Diego, forced out of combat in the Gulf of Tonkin by crews involved in anti-war activities. When the USS Ranger was ordered into action in June 1972, 20 acts of sabotage culminated in the destruction of the main reduction gear, delaying its sailing for more than four months. When the ship made it back to the Gulf of Tonkin, sailors disabled it once again by deliberately setting it on fire, the sixth major disaster in the Seventh Fleet in a five-week period.

• Sailors on the USS Coral Sea organized a “Stop Our Ship” (SOS) movement, forcing its return to San Francisco. SOS then spread to the USS Enterprise through its underground paper.

• By the end of 1971, resistance was intensifying to the point that U.S. commanders ran short of reliable ground troops to send into battle. When President Richard Nixon resorted to massive air power, launching a 12-day, all-out bombardment of much of North Vietnam, individual pilots refused to participate. The super-secret 6990th Air Force Security Service unit staged a work stoppage bordering on open mutiny. During the stoppage, according to Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power, there were cheers whenever a B-52 was shot down by the Vietnamese.

• In March 1972, when the USS Midway was ordered to leave San Francisco for Vietnam, protests and sabotage swept the ship. Crewmen spilled 3,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay (San Francisco Chronicle, 5/24/72).

• “Search and evade” — avoidance of combat by units in the field — became a virtual principle of the war.

• Between July 1, 1966 and December 31, 1973, there were 503,926 “incidents of desertion” (NY Times, 8/20/74). In 1970 alone, the Army recorded 65,643 deserters, the rough equivalent of four infantry divisions.

These incidents are only a sampling of the massive resistance and rebellion by GIs during the Vietnam War. Books have since described what was largely kept from the U.S. population. As Colonel Heinl reported in his “Collapse” article, these “widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam…have only been exceeded in this century…by the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917” in the Russian Revolution.

What GIs did in the past can be done again.

LOS ANGELES, CA, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party joined together with workers from a university campus here to rally and march into the office of the assistant vice chancellor. These workers have been fighting for four years in order to be hired by the university itself — not by an outsourcing company that had fired workers on a whim and forced the remaining workers to do twice the work. Recently, the workers won that battle, but the fight continues. 

In the last three months about 30 workers, almost a third of the staff, have received “counseling memos.” This is a fancy way of saying they were written up. Many of these write-ups were based on the fact that the supervisors didn’t understand what was necessary in order to get the work done. For example, one worker was written up for being “out of area.”  The worker wasn’t working in the building they were supposed to be because the workload they had been given in another building was too much and they could not finish on time. Three workers have been fired recently because of these attacks.

Latina Women Won’t Back Down 

The supervisors have also been harassing the workers in other ways, such as giving them their checks late. This is a blatant attempt to intimidate these militant, mainly Latina women workers. The bosses and supervisors are scared of these workers because they have refused to back down.

Today was no exception. The workers chanted and refused to wait as they walked into the building and into the assistant vice chancellor’s office. They presented him with a petition. They demanded that the harassments stop, that workers be rehired, that all “counseling memos” be rescinded, and that the workloads be reduced to a reasonable size for each worker.

The assistant vice chancellor said that he would “look into it.” These workers have heard that before. So they told him they need action within a week or they would continue to fight.

These university bosses and their pet bureaucrats should be scared. These workers have the will to fight and communists are on their side. We must transform this reform fight for reasonable working conditions. A reform maintains the system that keeps the working class fighting the same fights over and over again for the bare minimum. It essentially builds capitalism, and fools workers into thinking that capitalism can be reformed for workers’ interests. We need to put forth revolution. We need a system that works for all workers: communism.

Fifty members and friends of Progressive Labor Party from around the U.S. and Mexico, across borders, are participating in a Summer Project in Mexico. The PLP has planted the seeds of communism in Mexico, the U.S., and many other areas worldwide. We’re cultivating these seeds, a long-term process with many ups and downs, which will prepare the international working class for its role in making communist revolution.

This process involves many inter-connected elements, all of which are evident at the Project in Mexico:

The working class requires international unity, which we put into practice by building ties between comrades and friends across borders and by supporting workers’ and students’ struggles in all areas of the world. In building an international Party, we are overcoming capitalist divisions caused by racism, nationalism and sexism, as well as obstacles like different languages and cultural backgrounds.

Communists organize the working class and give leadership in the class struggle while introducing and fighting for PLP’s communist ideas in the struggle.

We understand the importance of raising the political consciousness of the working class and making communist ideas mass ideas. In the process of revolution for communism and consolidation of the new communist society this ideology is a powerful weapon.

We learn how to answer workers’ questions about the strengths and weaknesses of the old communist movement, how communism works in practice and overcoming capitalist individualism and anti-communist lies.

We are building a base among workers and students in order to organize Party study-action groups and Party clubs (collectives of members).

We are developing new leadership, especially among youth and women.

Spread PLP Literature 

In all areas, the PLP in Mexico is advancing. During the Summer Project, we organized study groups to understand the Party’s line: “What We Fight For.” Workers and youth in Party concentrations in factories, communities and schools agreed to join the study groups. One dynamic young woman, active at her university, joined PLP. 

In the first week of the Project, we distributed hundreds of CHALLENGES written and printed in Mexico. We also distributed 3,000 flyers about a community fighting back against government plans to cause flooding. They want to form reservoirs where water will be sent to purification plants and sold at prices working-class families can’t afford. Whole neighborhoods risk losing their homes so the government can continue to provide abundant water to wealthy citizens and irrigate large farms owned by capitalists inside and outside Mexico. Meanwhile, water is turned off in poor workers’ homes for many hours at a time.

Anger and fear are mixed as neighbors in this community organize to fight back with communist leadership and growing consciousness about the necessity to organize for communist revolution.

Capitalism offers scarcity, poverty and exploitation to the working class, from Mexico to India! The Party will organize international support for this struggle. (More details in an upcoming article.)

The Project so far has been well-organized and strongly led by a team of workers and students, including five women leaders from Mexico and the U.S. Capitalism uses sexism, like racism and nationalism, to divide workers and keep our class weak. Communists reject the idea that women and men should have separate roles in society. We need to pay more attention to winning and developing women in order to build unity and strengthen the Party and the working class.

Workers and youth from Mexico and the U.S. are organizing together, cooking and cleaning collectively, and overcoming the language barrier. Onward to week two!

(More articles and letters will follow about communist organizing among workers and youth and in the communities, among teachers and students, and evaluation and experiences of Project volunteers.)