LOS ANGELES —Hundreds attending the recent "Justice on Trial" film festival were pleasantly surprised to receive free copies of The New Jim Crow, by keynote speaker Michelle Alexander, courtesy of the Soros Foundation.
There was tremendous anger at mass incarceration, especially of black and brown men, and long-term solitary confinement. There was tremendous energy around building a movement called "All of Us Or None."
Many welcomed the comments of an audience member who argued that capitalism was the biggest criminal, robbing workers of their labor and killing masses in imperialist wars.
The positive goal of this movement to reform the "criminal injustice system" is called "restorative justice." Instead of punishment or vengeance, restorative justice is said to be about rebuilding community, fostering healing and forgiveness, and asking offenders to take responsibility for their actions so they don't repeat them.
But wait! Many prisoners are "guilty" only of not being able to afford a lawyer. Many are locked up for drug "offenses" that hurt themselves but not others. Many committed smallscale "property crimes" while the biggest crime – as that audience member said – is private property itself.
So-called "restorative justice" hides the fact that selfishness, alienation, violence and greed are built into the very structure of capitalist production. Anti-social behavior on a small scale reflects the anti-social nature of racist capitalist society. Who is "taking responsibility" for that?

Our responsibility is to end racist capitalism with communist revolution.
Communist society means everyone working for the common good, everyone sharing the benefits and the hardships. No money, no privilege, no exploitation, no racism. That will let us create real communities in which we struggle with each other to bring out the best in everyone and deal constructively with mistakes, including anti-social behaviour.

Michelle Alexander and George Soros: Strange Bedfellows?
Alexander wrote The New Jim Crow on a fellowship from the Soros Open Society Foundations in 2005. Since then, George Soros — a billionaire venture-capitalist and life-long rabid anti-communist — has given $$millions to "curb mass incarceration, eliminate harsh punishment, and ensure justice system accountability in the United States."
Alexander claims to want a "radically restructured society" but her alliance with Soros around prison reform is leading thousands of militant anti-racists, including potential revolutionaries, into a dangerous reformist trap. (see below)
After the USSR collapsed in 1989, Soros decided that the main threat to his "Open Society" was "market fundamentalism." He still hated communism, but considered it "dead."
"Too much competition and too little cooperation," Soros wrote, "can cause intolerable inequities and instability." He was one of the first major ruling-class figures to speak about the danger that the masses pose to their exploiters. Soros was hailed by Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who said in 1998 that Soros "takes us…just in the direction we ought to be going." And that's where they are going.
We can see it when The New York Times supports new NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio in his plan to curb the racist "stop-and-frisk" practices defended by outgoing Mayor Bloomberg. Stopand- frisk humiliates and stigmatizes a generation of black and brown youth who will soon be far more useful to the imperialists in their army than in their jails.
That same bosses' mouthpiece recently urged that US prisons become more like European ones (shorter sentences, more privacy) so as "to enable prisoners to lead a life of social responsibility free of crime upon release." There's "restorative justice." We wonder whether they think "social responsibility" includes killing and dying for US imperialism as it lurches toward World War III.
In short, US imperialists are following Soros' advice, trying to save capitalism from its own contradictions and from us, the masses, whom they rightly fear.
For that they need to balance racist repression with patriotic inspiration. So Alexander tells angry and rebellious black youth, quoting James Baldwin, that in spite of the most vicious institutionalized racism, "This is your home… we can make America what it must become."

We can and must make the whole world what it must become: a communist world without borders or bosses, money or markets
"Markets are basically amoral, you can say inhuman," Soros admits, "because they treat everything as a commodity." Straight from the horse's mouth! What neither he nor Alexander can ever admit is that only by mobilizing the masses for communism can we destroy this commodity system and build a truly humane society.

Thousands have protested in Santa Rosa, California, against the police murder of 13-year-old Andy Lopez. Andy was holding a toy AK-47 rifle in rural Sonoma County on the afternoon of October 22. Erick Gelhaus, Sonoma County Sheriff, shot Andy 7 times in 10 seconds. Oscar Grant was killed when Andy Lopez was in Elementary School. Trayvon Martin was killed as Andy entered Middle School and now Andy is dead before he completed 8th grade. Yet, even before his class graduates high school, police departments will be armed with drones! Imagine a cop like Gelhaus with his finger on a drone! ICWP is mobilizing for a communist revolution to put an end to racism and police terror once and for all.
Racist capitalism makes life cheap. In the current crisis, racist murders are taking place at a faster and faster pace. In Detroit, on November 2, 19-year-old African-American Renisha McBride was shot and killed as she sought help after a car accident. She was shot by a 54 year old white man on his porch. Neither this man nor cop Erick Gelhaus have been charged with any crime. Racist capitalism can't provide a safe future for any of us, most especially for black and Latin youth. These murders should spur us to deepen our commitment to mobilize our friends, family and co-workers for communism, where there will be no police and no system of exploitation that needs racism, where millions of workers will mobilize to stamp out racist acts and ideas.

Soros turned from accumulating $$ billions (from the sweat of the working class) to spending it to spread market capitalism. He worked with the US State Department to build movements to topple pro-Russian regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, toward the end of the inter-imperialist Cold War. These regimes were state-capitalist (not communist) but Soros hated them anyway. He supplied funds and photocopiers to pro- Western dissidents in his native Hungary in 1984. One such group was the Federation of Young Democrats, which became Fidesz, the current (and openly racist) ruling party. Fidesz presides over steadily rising poverty, and 91% of Hungarian respondents told a recent survey that anti-Semitism has increased in recent years. In Poland in 1991, Soros backed a team that allied with Solidarity, which had originally organized for socialism and worker cooperatives. These Soros agents got Solidarity to buy into a $1 billion IMF loan, replacing worker's cooperatives (small-scale capitalism) with imperialist- dominated private enterprise and soaring unemployment. These examples – and there are more! – should alert us to the danger of building alliances with imperialists like Soros. Instead, if you too are enraged by the racist system that Alexander describes so vividly, you should join us in fighting to win those in the movement to communist revolution.

Next Article