In 1955, emmet Till, a 14-year-old African-American youth, visiting relatives in Mississippi from his native Chicago, was brutally murdered because he whistled at a white woman who was a clerk in a store. The two white men who murdered him were acquitted by an all-white jury. soon afterwards, they admitted that they murdered the youth. Mass protests followed the racist verdict.
On Feb. 26. 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17-yearold black youth, was walking back from the store to his father's home in a gated community in sanford, Florida when george Zimmerman, a community watch volunteer, stopped him and shot him to death. Zimmerman is now on trial for 2nd degree murder after a series of postponements.
ICWP members and a friend distributed a leaflet and Red Flag at a demonstration in Oakland, where participants were demanding that Zimmerman be found guilty. The leaflet pointed out the following:
Racism is as old as capitalism.
It is deeply embedded in our social, political, economic and emotional life. It will take a revolution to uproot and smash it.
Racism is in fact a product of capitalism. Without slavery and the european settler imperialism of the Americas (massacring the indigenous population), industrial capitalism could not have taken off.
Later, without the colonial occupation of Africa and Asia, industrial capitalism could not have developed. Racism was central to both these stages.
Built on the exploitation of the masses, capitalism creates social classes. Racism has proven a key way of producing division within the exploited masses.
To take a stand against racism, then, is to take a stand against 500 years of capitalist development. It raises the question: what are we for? What must replace capitalism? We say communism!
We are not talking about the socialism produced in the soviet Union and China. Those revolutionaries thought socialism would lead to communism. They were wrong. socialism was state capitalism. Although modifying it, socialism still kept the class system of capitalism: at top were political heads, bankers and managers, at the bottom wage workers!
The communism we are talking about is a share-and-share-alike type.
It sets out to build a society where social needs (not money and profits) are the source of all production. Organized together in a mass communist party we will share the decisions, the difficulties and the successes of society. such a movement won't be built overnight but unless it's built, capitalism will survive.
And if capitalism survives, so will racism. History tells us that. U.s. slavery (at first, the dominant form of racism) was destroyed in the Civil War, but capitalism remained and produced Jim Crow and sharecropping racism.
segregation (then the dominant form of racism) was defeated by the Civil Rights movement, but capitalism was untouched and produced the "new Jim Crow" and mass incarceration. In all these forms, racist super-exploitation continued.
Today we are protesting the vicious murder of Trayvon Martin. sixty years ago it was emmett Till. A hundred years ago it was lynching and before that slavery….
The lesson of the great fight against racism tells us in no uncertain terms that we can't fight racism without fighting capitalism, and the way to eliminate it from the face of the earth is by building communism.
In the International Communist Workers Party (ICWP) we have already begun to build the communist alternative. Join us.
Read and distribute Red Flag. smash racism and the Capitalism that breeds it. Fight for communism.

By eliminating money, wages, and profits, communism will eliminate the material basis of racism.
Under communism, racism will not be tolerated. It will be smashed. A mass ICWP will liberate and promote workers' collective anti-racist consciousness. This anti-racism already exists, as evidenced in multiracial fights against the Klan and actions against local racist incidents. In the US masses of workers have fought the Klan and anti-immigrant racists from Connecticut and new Jersey to California. In Greece, workers fought the anti-immigrant racists of Golden Dawn.
Racism is not inborn; it is not natural. People aren't born racist. Racism is born from capitalism. It is promoted through their culture, religion, laws, wage system, media and education in order to divide, disempower, and exploit workers. Therefore, racism is profitable for capitalists and deadly for workers.
Under communism, workers in the fields, factories, schools and barracks will mobilize the masses to go to the streets to smash racist organizing. And if there is a racist remnant like a vigilante, the collective will decide, in their best interests, how to deal with him/her. We will have continuous anti-racist ideological education and organizing through meetings, debates and study groups.

Oakland, June 13—In two areas of this city we distributed 60 communist leaflets about Trayvon Martin and we sold some copies of Red Flag in the demonstration against the death of this black youth. A few minutes were all it took to see that we were in an area where many black and latino workers live. We talked with some of the spectators at the demonstration about communist ideas. Immediately a man gave us money for Red Flag. Those of us who came included a family, a comrade from the area, and a friend. Our small daughter had the most success in distributing the leaflet. Almost everyone she offered it to gladly took it. Even though the demonstration was small, it was a very important experience.
Returning to the house, we asked our friend what he thought about what we did and he answered, “For the people to demonstrate, they have to get to extreme poverty and live in very difficult situations so that they are against the system…but the majority live in a bubble and have illusions about capitalism.”
We answered that in part he was right, but that the most important thing is revolutionary ideas in the minds of the people, because even in extreme situations, without communist ideas, the revolution won’t happen automatically. We said that what’s primary at this time is to build a mass communist party internationally.
The friend has personally felt in these days the dimensions of racism in the US, as in other parts of the world. He is understanding that racism is a fundamental part of capitalism to exploit the working class; and that if we don’t destroy capitalism, racism will never disappear. We are all having a surprising experience about how negative racism is, but also about the fundamental impact of the ties of comradeship that the working class can build, without allowing origins, languages, cultures or colors to be obstacles. We all have the same needs as workers, and only our class knows how to meet them. We also have the same enemy. We don’t need bosses or money. Our class needs communism. We are convinced that communism will triumph and that every day that passes the tomb where capitalism will be buried gets deeper. Join ICWP.

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