FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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SEATTLE, WA, February 2—A group of Boeing workers heard about the Pasco (Washington) coroner’s remark, “We don’t want another Ferguson here.” One worker shot back, “Then don’t run down and execute a Hispanic worker in broad daylight at a busy intersection during rush hour.”
Three Pasco cops fired 13 shots point blank into 35-year old orchard worker Antonio Zambrano-Monte. They admitted he had no gun or knife. What else could they do with dozens of witnesses and a viral YouTube video?
The cops say they had “no choice” because Antonio threw a rock.
“Let’s see,” speculated another Boeing Red Flag reader, putting in words the cops’ twisted reasoning. “We’ll chase you down with guns blazing, but don’t worry, we’ll give you a rock!”
Sixty-eight thousand workers live in Pasco, more than half of them Hispanic/latino. It sits in one of Washington State’s largest agricultural regions.
Killer cop Flanagan had previously arrested Maria Davila-Marquez in 2012 when she asked for an interpreter after being wrongly stopped for an earlier disturbance. She was passing the crime scene on her way to pick up her children after completing her shift at the Pasco Tyson Foods plant. Cop Flanagan forced her head onto the hot hood of his patrol car, causing second-degree burns. The city hushed it up with a $100,000 payoff.
The analogy between the Pasco cops and Israeli troops who slaughter Palestinian kids for throwing rocks could not be ignored. US Border Patrol agents kill Mexican kids who throw rocks toward them at the border.
Nor can we ignore the recent murder of three Muslim students by a racist neighbor in North Carolina (see box).
“It’s even more serious these days,” stated another Boeing machinist.
Capitalism has visited upon us a worldwide plague of racist murder. Mobilizing the masses for communism is a present-day life and death struggle for all workers.
Communist Practice Leads To Revolutionary Theory
International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) leaders from three countries discussed the twin evils of racism and nationalism in this context. We must broaden this discussion as we produce a pamphlet for mass distribution. We ask your help in considering these and other critical questions:
Is racism mainly an issue in the United States, where capitalism rooted itself in the enslavement of African people? Or is it a big issue internationally?
Comrades from El Salvador described racism against Nicaraguan immigrants, from racist slurs to “jokes” about their appearance to deportations. “Nobody talks about it, but it’s there,” said a young industrial worker.
A South African report exposed the government’s plan to divert the anger of super-exploited or unemployed black youth towards small “spaza” shops owned by Somalis, Ethiopians and Bangladeshis. (See Red Flag, v. 6 #1, page 1).
Some workers at a recent ICWP conference in South Africa proposed a nationalist answer to racist imperialism: a new Pan-Africanism. Young comrades new to ICWP waged a sharp, successful struggle to defeat this pro-boss idea.
A Los Angeles comrade reported on a conference that laid bare the contradiction between nationalism and anti-racism. Latina mothers spoke about their sons, killed by the LAPD. A Pakistani activist spoke to the deadly rise of anti-Muslim racism. Yet despite objections, organizers insisted on limiting their slogan to “Black Lives Matter.”
How do we carry out a communist fight against racism today?
“When you don’t take racism seriously, it holds our work back,” a comrade declared.
He pointed to a situation where high school students in our base organized a walkout around the murder of 43 normal school students in Guerrero, Mexico but didn’t pull off a similar walkout around the murder of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.
Four of these students attended the meeting and had a lot to say. They are clearly struggling to develop a communist answer to racism.
A Los Angeles MTA transit worker described successful efforts he and co-workers made to integrate social activities and fight the boss together. Close to 100 workers at this site read Red Flag, and dozens are active Party members or supporters.
Another comrade noted that relatively integrated workplaces like MTA and Boeing are key centers from which we can spread the communist fight against racism.
Almost all nationalist arguments assume that destroying racism is impossible. Carrying out a bold communist plan to uproot racism—in words and deeds, now and in the future—will help defeat these capitalist ideas.
How can we present the history of racism in a way that allows workers to see the possibility of ending it?
A comrade noted that stereotypes about “other” peoples existed in pre-capitalist class societies like ancient Greece.
Others argued that racism rose with capitalism, from 15th-century Spain to 17th-century England and 18th century France, to the very foundations of the United States, where slavery was tied to the rise of finance capital.
Comrades described the “hidden history” of the working class, such as the Haitian rebellion that abolished slavery.
Racism thrives only because capitalism provides its material basis. Racist pay differences and racist unemployment, which lower all workers’ wages, are essential to the bosses’ profit. Every capitalist institution supports racist divisions that allow super-exploitation and wage-slavery itself to continue. That includes the organization of work, the schools, and even the way we are taught to view our own worth.
How will communism end racism? How intense will the anti-racist mobilization need to be after we take power?
“There will be racism even after the revolution,” said a black college student.
Communist revolution will quickly end the bosses’ racist political economy. But vestiges of the old system will remain in society at large. For example, segregated living conditions are still likely to exist. Remaining imperialists will use racism to undermine and attack liberated communist zones.
We’ll require a bold communist mobilization to eliminate racism as a social force. This time we’ll have the weapon of state power on our side. We can’t know every detail in advance, but we should start discussing this now.
One part will be breaking down divisions among people who grew up in different parts of the world. Everyone will learn several languages. More people will spend time living and working in different places.
We invite readers and Party collectives in each industrial concentration, workplace, classroom, and barracks to contribute to this urgent discussion, based on organizing more anti-racist struggle. We invite you to write, send letters and tweets, for Red Flag. Help if you can with translation into other languages, to carry this struggle to every corner of the globe.
Racism is a violent attack on the whole working class and the masses of the world. We invite you to join us in mobilizing the masses for communism to end racism, imperialist war, and all the other horrors of capitalism that are connected to racism.
On February 10, Craig Stephen Hicks invaded the Chapel Hill, North Carolina home of his Muslim neighbors, Deah Shaddy Barakat (23), Yusor Mohamad (21) and Razan Abu-Salha (19). He executed these students in cold blood with repeated shots to their heads.
These racist murders are as much an act of terrorism as the Charlie Hebdo killings. Yet local police are trying to pass it off as “a dispute over parking.” Hicks’ wife explained that he was “anti-religious,” as if that were an excuse.
“Races” were invented to justify the enslavement of African people and to divide the working masses so that the capitalists could continue to exploit them all. Spain’s rulers “racialized” Moslems in the 15th century, as well as Jewish people, as did French and other imperialists in the 19th and the Nazis in the 20th.
“Hindu” counted as a “race” in the 1930 US census. Now Muslims have been “racialized” as US imperialism intensifies fascism at home and prepares for wider wars, using racism to justify them, as imperialists always do.
Five thousand people attended the students’ funeral. "You're seeing an attempt to not stay segregated and separate, but to reach out to people for support, solidarity," said a local Imam. Interfaith groups across the US and elsewhere have held solidarity vigils.
But their widespread call for a “federal investigation” builds dangerous illusions about US capitalism.
The huge annual “Mass Moral March” in Raleigh, North Carolina, days after the murder, linked the Chapel Hill killings to last year’s lynching of Lennon Lacy, an African-American teenager. Media coverage featured Lacy’s brother who said, “This is not what America stands for.” Barakat’s brother said, “Muslims are Americans, too.”
Racist murder is exactly what capitalist America has stood for since the 17th century. It’s time we expose the deadly lies of American patriotism.
US President Barack Obama piously declared that "No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship." But he lets the Department of Homeland Security spy on mosques. He lets the US military drill recruits with racist anti-Muslim cadences.
Meanwhile Obama’s drones rain down terror and death on Muslim civilians in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere. Movies like “American Sniper” promote the vilest anti-Muslim racism.
The three Muslim students in Chapel Hill were killed by racist US imperialism, not just by Craig Hicks.
“What will we do to protect one another?” wrote an anguished black woman blogger.
We can only protect one another by mobilizing for communism to destroy this deadly racist system.
