Under capitalism, it is no crime to shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times as he tries to run for his life. That was the law laid down by a grand jury in Akron, Ohio, which refused to charge the eight kkkops who assassinated 25-year-old Jayland Walker last June. It was one more outrageous example of how deadly capitalism is for Black workers, and for young Black men and youths most of all. The capitalist bosses use their criminal injustice system to defend racist murder because it serves their interests to divide and terrorize the working class. Only when the working class takes power through communist revolution will all workers have a future to live for.

After chasing Jayland Walker for the capital offense of a broken taillight, the cops in Akron cornered him on foot in a parking lot and gunned him down with nearly one hundred bullets. The grand jury’s despicable failure to hold these murderers accountable exposed how young Black workers are blamed for their own assassinations at the hands of the state.

Racist terror epidemic
After mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, many workers desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Jayland’s killing proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters.  Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (USA Today, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets.

The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high--were slaughtered by the cops.  Fewer than a third of these killings involved even an alleged violent crime. The lynching of Jayland Walker was no aberration. Nearly one hundred murders-by-cop involved traffic violations; nearly four hundred involved people fleeing—workers mostly shot in the back. And 24 percent of these victims were Black workers and youth, nearly double their proportion in the general population. Over the last ten years, Black residents were three times more likely to be killed by cops than white residents. In Chicago, the rate was 25 times higher; in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, 28 times higher (The Guardian, 1/6).

Capitalism can’t exist without racism
The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers. They count on the terror that these armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries unleash on the most exploited sections of the working class. For hundreds of years, the U.S. bosses have reaped obscene profits from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers and from the wage slavery in their factories and fields. Today, as capitalism worldwide spirals into crisis, hard-won gains by the working class – led by Black workers and the communist movement – are quickly disappearing. While low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The median wage of Black workers is 20 percent lower than that of white workers (lending tree.com, 2/7).  For Black women, the difference is 46 percent (AAUW.com). The official unemployment rate for Black workers is 60 precent higher than for white workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4/7).

To justify their system’s terror and racist inequalities, the capitalists trot out their tired old lies about Black workers, and particularly about young Black men. The bosses’ more openly racist faction, now fronted by the Republican Party, explicitly courts the allegiance of the likes of Andrew Lester, the racist vigilante in Kansas City who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl for ringing the wrong doorbell. But the liberal Democrats are also eager to convince workers to fear and scapegoat one another and to rely on the bosses for protection. Black mayors like Eric Adams in New York and Karen Bass in Los Angeles are leading the push to put more killer cops on the streets (LA Times, 4/18).

These misleaders and apologists are appealing to workers made cynical by the chronic failures of capitalism. Their job is to deceive our class into trusting that the problems in their neighborhoods—drug abuse, homelessness, gang violence—can be solved by the very same capitalists who created those problems in the first place.

Profits, war, and fightback
Workers in Akron and Kansas City are right to be taking to the streets, marching shoulder to shoulder, demanding change. They are joining a wave of working-class anger simmering across the globe. From France and Britain to Canada and South Korea, workers are rising up and fighting back. Miitant protesters against Amazon and Adidas are calling out the billionaires who exploit our class from Seattle to Southeast Asia. Though the working class is not yet organized, not yet confident in its own enormous power, many are seeing that capitalism is an abject failure. The more we unite with each other to confront the bosses, the more confidence we build in our class.

At the same time, we must understand that capitalism cannot be fixed or reformed to serve workers’ needs. As a system driven by maximum profit, it must constantly lower labor costs. But as the working class becomes more impoverished, we cannot buy what the bosses need to sell. This basic contradiction fuels the inter-imperialist competition for resources and markets that will inevitably lead to the next global war. As the capitalists gear up for that conflict, they will need workers’ allegiance more than ever. As their crisis deepens, they will be forced to drop the mask of liberal democracy in favor of open fascist terror. The racist violence the bosses are now directing at Black workers is a reminder of what lies in store for all of us. The capitalists will stop at nothing to try to save their rotten system.

The bosses’ greatest fear is that the working class—armed with multiracial unity and the bold leadership of Black workers within a communist party—will transform the reform struggle against racism into a fight for communist revolution. The hard fact is that the working class has no need for capitalism or its bosses. Even if Jayland Walker’s killers had been indicted, like the murderers who killed George Floyd, we would all too soon be mourning another lost brother or sister. Under capitalism, the bosses need cops to keep them in power and sustain their profit system. Under communism, the working class will organize society to enable us to look out for one another. With no ruling-class parasites to protect, no exploitation to enforce, we’ll have no need for cops. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party! Power to the working class!

The following is an excerpt of the speech that’ll be given on May Day in Flatbush, Brooklyn on April 29.

Happy May Day to the international working class!
May Day is that day! The working class’s international holiday. It’s the day when workers from across the globe commemorate our triumphs, propelled by a vision of a world without capitalist exploitation and borders, run by the working class.

On May Day Progressive Labor Party (PLP) gathers its forces under one flag, the red flag, of communist revolution.

A communist society means one that is run by the working class and serves the working class–free of money, wages, bosses, and exploitation.

May Day is that day! The day in the year when we remember, celebrate, re-dedicate and affirm our determination to fight for a world full of potential.  A world where our children can grow up and bask in creativity and curiosity, but most of all to be fighters in a world where they look out for each other. A world where workers are fed, housed, challenged, and loved, that world is communism.

This rotten, decaying, vile system of capitalism that we currently live under does its very best to pit workers against each other. Ultimately leading us to choose sides in their  wars for profit. We can’t let the bosses win. We must unite to smash imperialist war with communist revolution. May Day is that day!

Capitalism in crisis
Since last May Day, it’s been another year of mass attacks on our class. The imperialists ruling the U.S, Russia and China are firing what could be the opening shots of World War III, and preparing our working class youth to be food for their missiles.

If you’re in Ukraine, the bosses tell you workers in Russia are responsible for the war. If you’re in Russia, the bosses tell you workers in Ukraine are responsible for the war.

All while the U.S. Media ignores the thousands of Black and Brown children slaughtered in Yemen and Africa during  recent wars. As in all imperialist wars, workers have no side in these conflicts. We have no class interest in fighting and dying for the capitalist rulers.

As these imperialist rulers hoard resources to prepare for their next global conflict, workers’ health and safety will suffer. To get workers to passively accept more disasters like the floods in Pakistan and Mississippi, and agree to fight in World War III, the capitalist bosses will need increasing fascist repression.

Fascism is capitalism in crisis in preparation for world war. When the bosses’ profit system starts breaking down, they become desperate to keep it afloat—at all costs.

It’s capitalism that’s driving the rise in homelessness and the epidemic of mental health problems. It’s capitalism that’s forcing millions around the world to flee their homes in the face of war and deadly poverty. The liberal rulers can’t reform their way out of these disasters; their system creates them  in the first place.

Liberal politicians use the fear of Trump to scare the working class into looking the other way as migrant workers and the homeless are terrorized. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and her fake-left Squad railed against Trump for ripping children from their parents’ arms and putting them in cages in Texas. Now these so-called progressives sit on their hands as Biden does the same as Trump and worse. If we let them get away with these outrages today, tomorrow they’ll be targeting the rest of our class.

“Lesser evilism,” the idea that some bosses are less racist, less sexist, or less profit-driven than others, is a literal “dead end.” It’s under a democratic president and a Black mayor that 16 year old Ralph Yarl was shot for ringing the wrong doorbell.

Under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party, the international working class must turn the guns around and seize state power. Only then can we guarantee that the work that we do, let me say that again, only then can we guarantee that the work that WE DO serves workers’ needs.

Celebrate!
We salute workers across the U.S. who took to the streets to fight back against the police murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. We stand in solidarity with Tyre’s family and countless names of workers slain by this murderous system. Another heartbreaking death in a city with a Black-led democratic ruling class. Proving once again the shallowness of identity politics that bosses use as a tool to divide us and that reforms don’t work. We don’t need more Black cops, mayors, or governors, we need a world run by workers!

Over and again, we see workers saving workers. In Pakistan, workers risked their lives by wading through toxic, deadly flood waters to distribute vital donations.

In Turkey and Syria, thousands of workers and youth are breaking through the border to help other workers after the earthquakes.

Fight for communism
All of these efforts are courageous and essential. But ultimately, they will be futile if we fail to understand that we can save ourselves and our class only by smashing capitalism, the root of all these problems.
Earthquakes will keep happening under communism. But when the working class gains state power, and enforces strict rules for development and building safety, the human toll of these disasters will be far less.

By working together and sharing resources, liberated from the divisions of private property and wage slavery, workers will create a safer, freer world.

We salute comrades fighting back!
Fight like our comrades at Kingsborough Community College who after being attacked by racist campus police bravely led many militant multi-racial marchers through campus forcing those very same cops to shut the campus down.

Fight like our comrades who are fed up with NYC bosses' attempts to cut retired workers' health care benefits.

Fight like transit workers in D.C and Virginia against cuts to benefits and unequal wages.
Fight like our comrade-teacher in Jersey who was fired for encouraging his students to be militant in the face of racism.

Fight like Carolyn, a lifelong party member who dedicated her life to serving the working class—fighting the KKK in Tupelo, spending the last week of her life volunteering at a soup kitchen, showing up at the courthouse to support the family of Raymond Chaluisant, a young worker murdered by a NYC  corrections kkkop.

These fightbacks are the bright spots we look to because here, the Progressive Labor Party is active! Here, workers and youth are being won to the only answer to the attacks of capitalism—communism.

Rededicate & Affirm
Today’s struggles where the party is active and winning our class to the fight for communism are the seed-bed for tomorrow’s participation in mass struggles.

Under capitalism, buildings sit empty while millions are homeless. Food is thrown away as people starve.

The education, healthcare, and transportation systems are failing. A system that cannot feed, shelter, educate, or cure does not deserve to exist.

Under communism, all production will be organized through a communist party to serve the needs of the working class. There will be no profits, no money— and no bloodsucking bosses. Without money to warp our priorities, everybody will be valued. Everyone will be helped to find ways to contribute. The time has come for the working class to say “Enough!” The time to fight for communism is now.

PLP is growing and developing the next generation of leadership. Our international working class needs to build the Red Army that will destroy this entire capitalist hellscape once and for all! We want all of you to join us! May Day is that day! Today is that day!

As communists we know that billionaire capitalists run things in our world and in the city of Chicago. The recent election of Brandon Johnson for Chicago’s mayor won’t change that. The election was seen as a win for progressives and antiracists by many (Johnson is Black and his opponent white). Antiracist, working class wins don’t happen through elections—they are the result of protests, strikes, and ultimately, communist revolution.
Brandon Johnson defeated Paul Vallas, a former head of Chicago Public Schools. Vallas worked to privatize public schools in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, Connecticut after leaving Chicago.  More recently he spent time serving U.S. imperialism in Chile and in Haiti. His school policies are in line with those in the ruling class (be they Democrats or Republicans) who promote charters and school vouchers to replace public schools. Johnson’s policies are in line with those capitalists who support public schools as the best way to prepare working class youth to be future workers and soldiers. Only communist revolution will create spaces that truly educate all.
Johnson was backed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, the Chicago Teachers Union, and many other politicians and unions who are considered progressive. The outlook of their movement is that through elections and protests, the working class can diminish racism and improve  education, health care, housing, and working conditions. Progressive Labor Party’s analysis is based on history and science, which indicates that U.S. capitalism is in an economic crisis. Until the capitalists are defeated with communist revolution, racist attacks will continue, and the rich will take back any gains we make as soon as they can. Under capitalism, inter-imperialist wars as well as wars against the world’s working class, will continue.
While open racists like Trump and Vallas appear to be our main capitalist enemies, liberals are actually the main danger. Whether they are well-intentioned and naive, or manipulative and brutal, liberal politicians, including Johnson, serve  the capitalist class.  As the capitalist system falls deeper into crisis and chaos, Johnson too will have to make budget cuts and ignore or crush dissent when it inevitably arises. Capitalism is a brutal system regardless of the face serving it, and there is no election that can change that.
Johnson and most of his supporters believe that his election will improve conditions for Chicago’s workers. Chicago has about equal shares of Latin, Black, and white residents, and also contains a growing Asian population. In general, Chicago’s white population is much wealthier than the other populations. Johnson has pledged to prioritize housing, education, and public safety. At the same time, he calls for a city that “respects the workers who keep it running and supports the entrepreneurs who keep it growing” (from his acceptance speech). This is an irreconcilable contradiction: the rich got that way because of their exploitation of the workers!
Crime was an important issue in the campaign. Johnson pointed out that many calls to police would be better handled by social workers and talked about the relationship of poverty to crime. However, he backed off previous support for “defunding police”, even though 40 percent of the city’s budget is spent on policing and Chicago has twice as many police per capita as the typical U. S. city. Under capitalism, police always “serve and protect” the rich— we won’t need them under communism.
Some members of PLP were active in the Johnson campaign even though we don’t agree that this racist, capitalist system can be changed through electoral politics. We join reform movements so that we can build relationships with workers who may later join our fight for communism. This election campaign is over, but the struggle continues, and we will invite many of those we worked with in the campaign to our upcoming May Day march.

BROOKLYN, NY, April 12—After a 17-year-old former student Claude* was killed in the streets, it forced the working class—students and teachers—of a small school to choose: fightback or passivity. While the final verdict is still out, the struggle has become a test for pro-communist ideas in the face of liberal fascism.
School, union, city: all gangsters for capitalism
The racist Black principal has been able to get away with blood on her hands (see boxed letter). When Progressive Labor Party says liberal fascism is the greater danger for the working class, this is what we mean. This principal—in a liberal city run by a Black ​​mayor Eric Adams—has successfully created an environment where students and education workers feel pressured to “lay low” and accept the expendability of Black youth as “normal.” This is one way the school stays one of “America's Best High Schools” in the U.S. News and World Report. To stay on top, the Black leadership throws out Black students like they’re trash.
But, it’s not just her.  The UFT District Representative—the educator workers’ union that prides itself on putting the needs of students on the back burner—was silent when one teacher had said, “The union needs to make a fight against these racist pushouts.”
This is the same district rep who spent what felt like hours detailing his diligence in keeping his teacher file up to date.
While this seems small, it’s a reflection of the limits of unions. The UFT leadership cynically puts electoral politics and teacher salaries over students’ learning conditions. This was no surprise considering the racist strike of 1968, when the UFT walked out as a response to the efforts of Black parents to exert community control over schools in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. A union that sacrifices Black and Brown students is a racist one.
One tenet of fascism (an old capitalist system in crisis headed for world war) is the idea of accepting expendability.
As the future of capitalism becomes more uncertain (see editorial, page 2), the bosses need a tighter control of their class and the working class. Capitalist schools train us to treat our class as disposable—to accept that some youth will just be homeless, unemployed, jailed, killed in war, erased. The ones who can make this fascist argument most convincingly are the ones who present themselves as pro-worker. This is the same type of idea that threw workers into gas chambers.
We will always remember him
How do you respond when a Black principal makes it taboo to discuss and honor a victim of capitalism and pressures a mainly-white-teacher force and a mainly-Black-student force to simmer down?
Several teachers have stepped up in the reform struggle—one organized a card and funds for the family, another made photos of Claude, another printed the poem “Kids who Die,” and yet another helped blow up balloons for the third memorial wall. Every teacher also received a la​​minated tag, “we will always re​​member [Claude].”
Several have now made a small memorial with all these items inside their classrooms. Some have also folded Claude into their lesson plans.
Some teachers and students wore a button on their shirts or bags. It was made using printed text, clear packing tape, and a safety pin.
However, through one-on-one conversations, approved personal days, bending of some dress codes for “good kids,” and awarding field trips to previously banned students, the administration has pacified many staff and students.
One described the niceness as “the calm before the storm.”
The working class is not dumb. We understand the administration was threatened by the show of worker-student unity. And it will be our unity that the administration will come after. They will pit “good” students against struggling students, new teachers against tenured teachers.
This divide-and-conquer strategy will be no match for a politically conscious working class. That’s why linking this fight to capitalism and war is key. CHALLENGE readership has grown tremendously compared to its meager distribution before Claude, and building relationships with co-workers and students is needed more than ever. We need to win the masses to see the fight for communism as the only answer deserving of Claude’s memory. Communism means we serve ALL kids. No child is expendable.
Kids over capitalism
If Claude weren’t pushed out, would he have been alive to walk on graduation day in three months? An administration that cares more about data and awards than a Black child has got to go. Claude’s killing has exposed a criminal policy that we need to fight.
Claude was not a number. He was a member of the working class, and he deserved better. A system that treats certain students as expendable DOES NOT deserve to exist. For our students, shut this racist system down.
*The pseudonym Claude is inspired by the communist fighter and writer, Claude Mckay.
*****

Letter: Fight to stop student pushout!

The following letter is written by a new teacher who became involved in the fight for Claude and against pushout.
As a person new to teaching and new to Brooklyn, the treatment of the legacy of a former student who was fatally shot near the school where I teach opened my eyes to not only how the school to prison pipeline functions, but to how treatment of working class students in a capitalist system kills.
When Claude was killed, the school that I work for not only did nothing to memorialize their former student, but fought hard against students and teachers who wanted to memorialize him themselves. Students created a memorial for Claude that was hung in the hallway. It was taken down by administrators the next day. When they hung it back up it was taken down almost immediately. Students overheard their principal admonishing Claude to other students and teachers, using racist rhetoric and accusing him of being in a gang in order to justify erasing his memory from the school after his death. The principal even antagonized teachers who took a personal day to attend their former student’s funeral.
This strange response can be explained by the fact that Claude was pushed out of our school. Our school boasts a 95 percent graduation rate which is very rare for our district, and one way that they achieve this is by pushing out students who threaten this misleading statistic. Student pushout is incredibly common in New York City, and this event has opened my eyes to how it unfolds in real time. Students are suspended with little reason, harassed by administrators, and working class parents are consistently asked to leave their jobs to attend disciplinary meetings at the school. Since forcing students to leave is illegal, employees of the Department of Education instead harass and bully children and parents until they decide that it is best to leave. Often administrators will convince parents that their students' needs would simply “be better met at another school.”
But this is not the truth.
Suspensions and push outs follow students, making it difficult to keep up with classwork, maintain good grades, and apply to college. It is already widely understood that suspensions, which is a critical aspect of the pushout process, are damaging to students and greatly increase their likelihood of being incarcerated. In a racist school system these practices disproportionately affect Black and brown students. So why do schools continue this practice?
Capitalism forces schools to compete with each other for scarce funding, resources, and even for students. Graduation rates and test scores are important to school bosses, and one way to keep high scores with limited resources is to get rid of students who threaten their scores. Instead of viewing students as fully formed humans, they are viewed as pawns to be traded, bargained for, and cast off. But schools don’t have to be this way!
Teachers should understand that this system not only harms students, but harms us as well. When we treat students like numbers, like problems, and pawns, we create a hostile environment that affects our lives too. We watch students that we care for be harassed, excluded from our classrooms, and disappeared from our schools without our consent. Teachers need to understand that this is a problem that is worth fighting about. Together, with parents and students we can fight for schools that care for all students, not just students who are willing to follow the status quo.
Parents, teachers, and students unite to end this violent, racist practice. Unite to end capitalism!