FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
ICWP@Anonymousspeech.com

August 21—Prisoners across the US are planning strikes against slavery inside the industrial-prison complex.  They’re set to start on September 9, the anniversary of the 1971 Attica prison uprising.
When communists urge us to rise up and cast off our chains, we know that they are talking about wage slavery.  And for many of our brothers and sisters prison slavery is a brutal reality. Let’s support their strike with actions calling for communist revolution to end slavery in all its forms. 
In the decades after the ‘60s Civil Rights struggles and rebellions, both Democrats and Republicans started to criminalize protest movements.  Their calls for “law and order” were thinly-disguised efforts to mobilize white voters around racism to hold black and latino/a workers back.
In the 80s, US capitalists’ drive for maximum profits made many blue collar jobs disappear from large inner cities. Rather than meeting the needs of those most affected by job loss and drug use, the Reagan administration created the “War on Drugs.”
Casual drug users suddenly faced maximum sentences. The sentencing for powder cocaine, mainly used by whites, was much less than sentencing for crack cocaine. The legal and political system had found a way to carry out racist attacks without one mention of race! 
The Clinton administration followed the same line with its “Southern strategy.”  Its 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill was the main cause of skyrocketing mass incarceration in decades that followed. 
Both the Reagan and Clinton administrations used the welfare system to divide the poorest classes. Politicians used catch-phrases like “welfare queens” and “super-predators” to scare and separate white blue-collar workers (many of whom had been unionized) from workers of color.  It also divided black from latino/a workers and young from old.  This helped them bust unions and lower the standard of living for all workers. 
New prisons were built five times faster than ever before.  A new “underclass” was created.  Formerly incarcerated black and latino/a men and women often left prison with no hope for jobs or housing.  They often faced this legal system without attorneys, or with public defenders whose caseloads barely allowed them to know the family. 

Prison Labor:  Modern “Convict Leasing”
In the late-19th and early 20th centuries, “chain gangs” and “convict leasing” became new forms of slavery.  Counties openly sold prison labor to farms and factories. 
During the “Coal Creek War” of 1891-92, armed miners freed convict laborers and sent them home.
In the 1920s, communists in North Carolina and elsewhere led fights to end convict leasing.  They won some reforms and many think that convict labor has disappeared.  Just the opposite is true.  
It’s good business to pay workers as little as possible.  By using prison labor, corporations are maximizing profits on their investment in privatized prisons. In states such as Colorado, Arizona, and Texas, prisoners are used to produce luxury goods and services such as goat cheese, farmed fish and training and grooming dogs. Prisoners, working for a few dollars a day, produce these items for pricey specialty stores in more affluent areas. 
The greedy investors claim that prisoners are learning skills, getting out of their cells, exercising, and being given a chance to earn wages.  In reality these corporations are simply taking advantage of a vulnerable population.  Prisoners can’t access education, training, exercise and paid work, except by the will of their jailers. 
Private prisons are filling up with black and brown people.  Many have been convicted of minor crimes.  Others are “guilty” of being in the US without full immigration status.
It’s easy to get away with evil when it’s so terrible that many people don’t believe what is actually happening.  We have to face evil straight on, and create a better future for everyone! This won’t happen under the present system.  Whether the leaders are Democrat or Republican, they have the same corporate masters!
We need to rid ourselves of corporate exploiters.  Let’s create a better society, one that treats all people equally, that produces only what is actually needed and that gives everyone food, housing and time to develop close family ties!
Such a society will not need prisons.  Nobody will be enslaved.  Work will not be motivated by violence and the threat of starvation.  Instead we will work because of our commitment to serve the masses.  Power to the Workers! 

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