FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Racism is as old as capitalism. It is deeply embedded in our social, political, and emotional lives. It will take a revolution to uproot it.
Putting cameras on cops or creating civilian review boards won’t do it. We will have to build a radical new society where co-operation, not exploitation, becomes the hallmark of human interactions. We will have to build a communist society, the likes of which the world has yet to see. That’s the historical task we can’t escape.

The rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century could not have happened without the racism that justified slavery and genocide.  Without slavery, the cost of growing cotton would have been prohibitive. Without razing the villages and burning the crops of indigenous farming families, slave owners would have had no land to plant cotton on. And the cotton industry drove the rise of British imperialism.
Racist ideology and capitalist expansion joined forces in the British looting of India.  They pushed opium into China to break into the then-richest market in the world.  Other European powers rushed in, too, to occupy Africa.  The holocausts in the Congo and Namibia filled the coffers of rising banks like Barclays.
Racism developed to justify the astronomical profits for the bankers and industrialists created by these bloody campaigns.

Ideas grow out of social practice. Racism first emerged to justify the thuggery of capitalist production, but it quickly found other uses.
Capitalism, built on the exploitation of the masses, needs racism to maintain its social class system.  Racism, with its counterpart nationalism, has us seeing differences when we should be seeing likeness.  It has us fighting oppression but not exploitation.
And exploitation, where bankers and industrialists steal the value our world-wide labor creates, is the core of capitalism. By crippling the growth of class consciousness, racism weakens the ability of the whole working class to gather its overwhelming numbers and act with decisive revolutionary force to smash capitalism. Racism, like nationalism too, sabotages our ability to build the communist future we need.

To take a stand against racism, then, is to take a stand against 400 years of capitalist development. We can’t fight racism but leave capitalism untouched. Raising demands to integrate police forces won’t defeat racism.  A black female sergeant stood by as cop Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death!
The fight against racism is far more challenging. History tells us that, US history in particular.
Legal US slavery (at one time the main form of racism) was destroyed in the Civil War.  But capitalism remained and produced Jim Crow and segregation. Legal segregation (then the dominant aspect of racism) was defeated by the Civil Rights Movement.
But the reforms ending legal segregation left capitalism intact.  Schools, churches, and neighborhoods are still highly segregated.  Capitalism’s mass racist unemployment and police terror are now, if anything, worse.
In the 1960’s, black workers and youth led massive rebellions in every major US city against this racist police terror and unemployment. Black soldiers and sailors gave leadership to many white and latino soldiers and sailors in multi-racial rebellions against the racist military brass and their genocidal war in Vietnam.
These mass rebellions showed the revolutionary potential of all workers and soldiers, especially black.  They helped force US imperialism to leave Vietnam. However, capitalism-imperialism and all its horrors remained intact.
In response, the US bosses produced the “new Jim Crow” and mass incarceration (the main aspect of racism today in the USA).

The lesson of the great fights against racism worldwide is clear: we can’t fight racism without fighting capitalism. And that raises the question: What do we fight for? We say communism.
We are not talking about the socialism of the former Soviet Union or China. Those revolutionaries thought socialism would lead to communism. They were wrong. Socialism kept the wage system.  It mirrored the old capitalism: at the top were political heads, managers and bankers; at the bottom wage workers who struggled to pay the bills!
The communism we are talking about will build a society where social needs (not money and profits) motivate all production. Organized together in a mass communist party, we will argue over, iron out and share the decisions, difficulties and successes of society.
This movement won’t be built overnight but it is the only way to defeat racism.  History tells us that.
The masses now are in motion. Let’s seize the chance to build the International Communist Workers’ Party!

 Note:  This article is an early step in the development of our forthcoming pamphlet on racism.  We welcome criticisms and suggestions.

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