Capitalist individualism and its culture of violence fueled the recent massacre in Aurora, Colorado. James Holmes, a loner entranced by movie mayhem, shot 70 people, fatally wounding 12 — a deranged and despicable act.  

As the bosses’ media focused attention on his carnage, Holmes became the nation’s most notorious criminal. But there are far more lethal threats facing our class — from the capitalists themselves. Holmes’ mass murder, as horrific as it was, pales in comparison to the atrocities the U.S. ruling class routinely commits against its own workers. It is put in the shade by the U.S. war machine that mows down workers in the Middle East to secure the imperialists’ profits. 

While pundits cry that gun control is the only way to stop Holmes’ brand of freelance slaughter, capitalism kills exponentially more people without breaking a single law. Profiteers create mass poverty. Lifesaving health care is denied to tens of millions unable to pay the insurance and drug companies. Massive racist unemployment, an integral part of the system’s perpetual boom-and-bust crises, sends millions more to an early grave. Racist cop murderers in New York and Anaheim, California, to name but the latest, sustain the rulers’ profit-making by terrorizing black and Latino workers and youth.

If we want people to treat each other as sisters and brothers, we must destroy the system that breeds these horrors and creates ticking time bombs out of people like Holmes. In short, the profit system has got to go. We need a communist society, free of bosses, exploitation, racism, sexism and profits. We need a workers’ society led by a mass, revolutionary communist party to guarantee that our class will share all the value we create, according to need.

“Gun control” can’t be the answer in a country whose profit-makers are the world’s biggest suppliers of military weapons and who invade more countries than the rest of the world combined.

Talk about mass murder! For eight years, President Bill Clinton ordered the U.S. Air Force to enforce sanctions that denied food and medicine to workers in Iraq. Besides killing more than a million Iraqis, the sanctions paved the way for George H.W. Bush’s 1991 invasion. George W. Bush’s 2003 “shock and awe” invasion killed a million more Iraqis. Then, Barack Obama’s occupation and maintenance of U.S. military bases served to protect Exxon Mobil’s seizure of the country’s biggest oil fields. 

Remote-controlled U.S. aircraft drones currently liquidate dozens of workers at a time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia — another example of racism on a global scale. Most are civilians, which doesn’t stop Obama from taking credit and pride in ordering the hits personally.

Now the U.S. Army has issued a directive that justifies slaying innocents on a scale beyond the imagination of solitary madmen like Holmes. On July 18, the Army’s top general, Ray Odierno, sent a “doctrinal publication” called “Civilian Casualty Mitigation” down the chain of command. While warning that killing non-combatants can create anti-U.S. feeling, the document essentially gives the go-ahead to the practice when the stakes are high enough. Odierno’s death warrant reads in part:

In most cases, civilian casualties are a type of collateral damage…. [that] is not… excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack….When conducting combined arms maneuver against an enemy force, the opportunity to take decisive action against the enemy may take precedence over protecting civilians.

Preventing Iran from competing for Mideast oil exports no doubt meets Obama’s and Odierno’s profit-driven “ethical” test. The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on July 29:

U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon shared Washington's contingency plans for a possible attack on Iran with Israel's PM [Netanyahu], according to a senior American official....Donilon sought to make clear that the United States is seriously preparing for the possibility that negotiations will reach a dead end and military action will become necessary. 

A separate piece in the same Haaretz issue said, “Romney's senior national security aide Dan Senor told reporters that the Republican presidential candidate would ‘respect’ Israel's decision if it were to ‘take action on its own in order to stop Iran from attaining nuclear weapons.” Romney would have Israel do the dirty work. For his part, Obama recently offered to bribe fascist Israeli rulers with advanced weaponry if they delayed a strike on Iran’s nuclear sites until after the U.S. presidential election in November.

Obama and Romney may both be posturing to demonstrate their “toughness” on Iran to U.S. voters, but their positions are more than mere show. Hundreds of thousands of workers in Iran could become “worthwhile collateral damage” in a U.S. or Israeli assault on Iran’s potential nukes. Five years ago, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) cautioned:

It is impossible to predict in advance the number of people that would be killed and injured in a full attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities....[E]ven a narrowly targeted military plan would have severe public health impacts…. The Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center….is… only four kilometers from the city of Esfahan with one and a half million people.

PSR warns of the “potential to kill nearby populations similar to the accidental explosion of the chemical plant and release of chlorine gas in Bhopal, India.” Obama’s unholy “collateral damage” doctrine would sanction these murdered Iranians’ sacrifices for the sake of Exxon Mobil’s profits. This policy is the heir of President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 doctrine that U.S. oil interests must be guaranteed by any means necessary, including armed force. Such are the murderous doctrines of the “lesser-evil” Democrats.

Capitalism means the murder of workers. The Progressive Labor Party advances international class war against these rulers. We’re fighting back on five continents to organize against racist terror and lead workers to a communist future.

This includes South Asia, where women workers in PLP lead the struggle to rebuild villages ravaged by so-called natural disasters and worsened by capitalist profiteers.

It includes Haiti, where the Party is organizing against the cholera epidemic set off by invading UN forces.

It includes Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York, where PL’ers are leading the fight against the murderous racist cops. 

It includes Palestine-Israel, where Party members are fighting U.S.-backed Israeli billionaires who wipe out workers’ villages to build profit-making estates for the rich.

It includes Anaheim, where PL’ers are supporting rebels against racist police killings.

It includes Oaxaca, Mexico, where PL teachers helped lead the fight against government union-busting. In Mexico City, PLP led a struggle against government policies that flooded workers’ neighborhood.  

Out of these struggles, workers are joining the revolutionary PLP to build a mass party that will ultimately wipe out the capitalist scourge that butchers the international working class. Our Party will usher in a communist society to free our class from racism and sexism, poverty and mass unemployment, exploitation and imperialist war — forever!

ANAHEIM, CA, July 27 — The chants began with “Let Us In! Let Us In!” but quickly changed to “Police Say Get Back, We Say Fight Back” and “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police!” as more and more people pressed into the small lobby outside the Anaheim City Council chambers on July 24. As a hearing on recent police killings was starting, PLP and members of the community joined relatives grieving for Manuel Díaz and Joel Acevedo. Both were murdered by the Anaheim police over the previous weekend. 

On Saturday, July 21, immediately after Díaz was shot twice from behind, neighborhood friends and families confronted the police. The kkkops attacked the militant crowd — including entire families with children and babies in strollers — using rubber bullets and police dogs.

Then, on Tuesday, Anaheim workers and youth fought back! PL’ers joined the workers and students who refused to “ask” the cops for permission to voice their frustration. Instead, we demanded the jailing of killer cops. The crowd stormed City Hall and confronted the police and Anaheim council members and later marched to the Anaheim police station, blocking traffic and taking over the streets.

People pounded on cop cars and defiantly gathered at street intersections. Back at City Hall others yelled in the faces of cops and some angry youths bumped into the police line. The cops raised their batons and hit teenagers as young as 13, many shielding themselves with their skateboards.

One cop responded to teenagers throwing dirt clods by aiming his handgun at one youth. The crowd surged forward and pushed into the street. A young woman, a relative of one of the men shot execution-style, angrily stalked back and forth along the line of cops, yelling accusations of murder in their faces and jabbing her finger at each of their chests.

The large multiracial crowd grew to about 1,000 and continued to chant and confront the cops late into the night. These workers showed no fear in taking on these racist killers.

Capitalism’s Austerity Attacks Latino Workers 

Working-class families have much to be angry about in Anaheim. This racially diverse city, with 53 percent of its population Latino, suffer the same high jobless rates, exorbitant housing costs and vicious austerity measures affecting education and other social services as the rest of California. While Disneyland and other corporations continue to receive large subsidies and public monies, working-class families employed at the “Happiest Place on Earth” get paid poverty wages, and are terrorized by trigger-happy cops. As exists worldwide, capitalism in crisis has only one slogan: “Save the Bosses, Banks and Corporations — Screw the Workers.”

Working-class communities like Anaheim live under repressive policies, anti-immigrant racism and fascist terror that use fear and direct violence to silence residents’ class anger. It’s no accident that Anaheim was California’s testing ground for the federal government’s racist Secure Communities, a program that combines the forces of the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to more effectively deport immigrant workers. 

Like the rest of the U.S., California’s Latino youth are twice as likely compared to whites to be sentenced to prison. Black workers are six times more likely to be incarcerated. In addition to being imprisoned in both the state jails and in immigrant detention centers, Latino men in Anaheim are murdered frequently on the streets by cops.

Since 2007, these fascist Anaheim cops have murdered 16 people; nine were Latino. With the capitalist crisis deepening here, this racist trend is rapidly increasing. The killing of Díaz and Acevedo brought Anaheim police shootings in 2012 to six; five were Latino. 

Many in the crowd asked about our signs, enlarged pictures of the CHALLENGE “WANTED For MURDER!” front page that condemned recent racist killings nation-wide. People readily agreed that police departments systematically terrorize black and brown communities and criticized the city’s suggestions that the recent tragic murders were the result of “a few bad cops.” Many took CHALLENGE, open to the idea that capitalism is at the root of these racist cop killings.

By Tuesday night’s end, 24 people were arrested and scores were injured. Driving past the many police blockades placed throughout the city, PL’ers smelled the smoke and saw the fires. We talked with some teenagers who lifted their shirts to show us the bruises the rubber bullets left on their bodies. They said the cops fired at them without warning.

Cops ‘Protect and Serve’ Bosses Profits

If they had any previous doubts about capitalism’s kkkops and courts, these youth now have no illusions; they know that the Anaheim police don’t “protect and serve” their community, but instead only protect and serve the interests of the bosses and their profits. 

In California, unions and politicians are promoting Governor Brown’s “Tax Initiative” as a way to pacify working-class fight-back at our schools and jobsites by focusing on voting. Likewise, in Anaheim politicians and local religious figures are trying to win over residents with promises of federal investigations, policy changes or electing Latinos to the City Council. Many of these public figures are condemning the “violence” by protesters. 

PL’ers will continue to support and stand side-by-side with our militant working-class sisters and brothers in Anaheim who showed no fear in fighting capitalism’s fascism and racist killer cops. We will continue to distribute CHALLENGE and build relationships, explaining to our friends why capitalism always needs racism and state violence (here and worldwide) to defend its profit and power by super-exploiting these victims of racism and trying to divide the working class. 

From Brooklyn and the Bronx, NY, to Sanford, Florida, and Anaheim, workers must take to the streets and fight back against the bosses’ racism and kkkops. Progressive Labor Party is on the streets, in the schools, on our jobs, in the military — building our class anger and our Party to the fight for communist revolution. Only this can destroy the system that oppresses our class and then erect a society run by and for workers, the creators of all value.

BRONX, NY, July 28 — On July 19, hundreds rallied and marched on Bronx’s 47th precinct demanding the conviction of Richard Haste, the cop who murdered black teenager Ramarley Graham in his own home on February 2. This was the 18th consecutive weekly vigil commemorating each of the years young Ramarley was alive. Once again Ramarley’s parents were militantly out front.

Due to consistent mass, multiracial pressure, Bronx District Attorney Johnson finally indicted Haste, but only on manslaughter charges. The masses have been demanding murder indictments, not only for Haste but for all racist kkkops who supported him.

PLP comrades and others have  also called sharply for indictments of Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly, the primary ruling-class architects of the racist terror that has slaughtered one black worker every other month in NYC since last November!

Beginning with our brother Ramarley’s funeral, week in and week out a growing number of PL’ers and friends have become deeply involved in working closely with workers in the neighborhood and in mobilizing our friends for regular mass actions. Because of the trust we’ve developed, we’ve been increasingly able to raise our ideas for multiracial unity against fascist terror, reliance on the working class, not politicians and for communist revolution as the only solution.

Each week PLP distributed CHALLENGEs and PLP leaflets en masse while also regularly carrying a Party banner. During most marches people have often shouted, “Give the teacher the mike!” and one  young comrade has led chants against fascist genocide and for fight-back uniting women and men, workers and students, black, Latino, Asian and white.

But nationalists, pseudo leftists, lawyers, preachers and politicians have also constantly hammered various pro-capitalist, opportunist positions, confusing many honest protesters. In effect, they’re laying down the gauntlet for us to widely expand our own leadership in class struggle, with mass CHALLENGE sales and deepening ties with everyone we bring to and meet in the struggle.

This final vigil, march and rally showed clearly how the bosses are working overtime to co-opt and derail anti-fascist struggle. The Nation of Islam speaker urged everyone to kiss the backside of the system: “Do not be disrespectful to those in power above us. We need more strong politicians.” And, in effect, he complimented our work and presence with blatant anti-communism: “We are here only for young Ramarley and his family. Do not try to attach your agenda to this
agenda!”

The New Black Panther Party speaker passionately summoned black people alone to rise up in self-defense, ending with the chant, “Black Power, Black Power,” picked up by some in the crowd. But that refrain rang particularly hollow, given the thoroughly multiracial make-up of the hundreds rallying outside Ramarley’s home.

However, PLP’s deepening involvement in this fight and principled struggle for PLP’s ideas guaranteed our opportunity for rebuttal. Immediately one young PL’er spoke, contradicting virtually every reactionary point the nationalist had pushed! He concluded with a call for unity with the lockout of Con Ed workers, then leading the sharpest fight against the ruling class that organizes fascist terror. He challenged every anti-racist present to join the protracted struggle for communist revolution.

After the rally at the precinct, many participants marched to the Graham family’s church for another rally where capitalist bigwigs were the featured speakers. Led off by the bosses’ media personality Al Sharpton — who years ago informed on black leaders for the FBI — they focused on diverting us into the suicidal gutter of electoral politics. Brooklyn Councilman Williams warmly introduced City Comptroller Liu who unabashedly pushed his mayoral bid.

These are the same politicians who hadn’t shown their faces previously or at the demonstration that night and had pushed for a silent Father’s Day demonstration on 5th Avenue. Imagine if that march had had the militancy of those led by Ramarley’s family!

However, ultimately the working class is very sharp. If we redouble our efforts, more and more will respond to PLP’s ideas and join to bury this racist ruling class. While listening to the crap emanating from the pulpit, a comrade quietly slipped a CHALLENGE and a PL leaflet into the hands of a middle-aged black worker. During several speeches he quietly read the entire leaflet, then folded it carefully, placed it in his backpack along with the CHALLLENGE and walked out of the church with his cane — another of the system’s victims who may join capitalism’s gravediggers for the most joyful funeral in history.

CHICAGO, IL, July 11 — Progressive Labor Party and angry teachers, students, parents and workers came out to Kennedy-King College for one of the three planned Chicago Public School (CPS) budget meetings for the 2012-2013 school year. The racist proposed budget didn’t do much of anything to meet the needs of children in Chicago, just like all other school budgets in working-class communities. It was evident that the budget in Chicago, like many places around the U.S., had significantly less money to use for our students.

The imperialist needs of the U.S. ruling class to maintain oil profits in the Middle East has led to millions of deaths of our working-class brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan and the wholesale destruction of social services and education domestically. The presentation lasted about thirty minutes, and the board then announced that there would be two hours for the public to speak and ask questions. 

The auditorium was ringed by about 12 CPS and Kennedy-King security officers. One by one, teachers and parents and school workers came up to the microphone to angrily denounce the cuts. Teacher after teacher told of over 160 schools with no libraries in them, while Chicago Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard makes over $250,000 a year, plus bonuses. A janitor said they should stop layoffs, reporting that the remaining janitors are being over-worked, which leads to unhealthy and unsanitary conditions for our children.

Parents spoke about the CPS’s disrespect of the teachers and the students. Our children’s schools don’t have heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer as temperatures reach 100 degrees outside and 110 degrees inside.  There’s no money for arts and science programs, but plenty for Chicago KKKops and metal detectors to make the schools resemble a prison.

Parents and community members saw that the funding for local public schools goes down but money for the failed charter school system goes up. As they took the mic to address the racist school board, almost every speaker had CHALLENGE in their hand, received from PL members outside the door. 

We talked about how capitalism, no matter who is in charge, can never truly educate our children and fulfill the needs of the working class; only communism can. One comrade exposed the CPS’s attacks: 

Not only will these cuts hurt every child attending a public school in the city of Chicago, but these budget cuts are racist. Is there one school on the Gold Coast [rich area of Chicago] getting a budget decrease or that has no library or proper heating…No! Are any of your children in any of these charter schools or any public schools on the South or West Side?...No! And why are 95% of the charter schools and school closings on the Southside and the Westside? Does it have something to do with the fact that the Westside and the Southside are majority black and Latino? So this school board is RACIST!

We brought a communist message to the meeting that wasn’t there before. It was no longer about just increasing spending on public school children or supporting this tax or that candidate in the dead-end electoral system.

Instead, the community heard the message that if you truly want change that you must smash capitalism and fight for communism. Joining PLP is the first step toward a society that educates every child and provides them with a safe environment and a better future in which to grow.