FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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The right to vote guarantees “full citizenship” and “equal justice”? Tell that to the families of Mike Brown, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice!
The movie “Selma” deals with the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1965 to demand the right to vote for black people. But it’s really about the police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The movie’s soundtrack, “Glory,” with the phrase, “we marched through Ferguson, with our hands up,” makes that clear.
The movie stresses the conflict between Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson over the timing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. In a key scene, King tells Johnson that it can’t wait. After the cold-blooded police murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, King tells Johnson that there will be no ”justice” for his murder because in Alabama black people can’t vote, and so they can’t serve on juries.
Fifty years later, masses are in motion protesting the cold-blooded police murders of unarmed black men and boys. Grand juries with proportional representation of black jurors have refused to indict, let alone convict, these murderers. A black president and a black attorney general can’t provide “justice” for these murders, let alone prevent more.
Arguing that the right to vote will bring justice to black youth and workers is a lie—just like the whole concept of “justice” in a system based on wage slavery and class rule. The reality on the ground in the inner city is that the police are the enforcers of a racist system. Capitalism uses the police to terrorize black and latino workers, break strikes, protect private property and maintain the status quo.
The ruling class in 1965 was terrified of the revolutionary potential of angry black workers and youth. In “Selma,” militant young men are easily convinced that responding violently to violent attacks would be suicidal. The truth is, most black workers and farmers in the South owned guns and used them to defend themselves and their families against racist attacks. Black workers and youth in the urban rebellions of the 1960s—Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and others—were definitely not nonviolent.
After Mike Brown’s murder last August, rioting swept Ferguson for more than a week, and again in November when a grand jury failed to indict his murderer. Ministers who arrived in October failed to calm angry youth who had gathered from around the country to protest this murder and the militarized police response.
The ruling class is still terrified of revolutionary class violence. They should be afraid that today’s angry youth will be won to communism. The fact that almost a thousand people, young and old, and of all “races” took Red Flag at the MLK march in Los Angeles shows that potential.
The bosses want to divert our anger into a movement for the vote: their trump card and main strategy. The vote has always been purely symbolic—tying workers to capitalist politics and holding out the vain hope of change. Today, the movement around “the New Jim Crow” seeks to channel opposition to racism into the “All of Us or None Felony Voting Project,” which demands the right to vote for the formerly incarcerated. The crack epidemic, “the war on drugs,” mass prison construction, racist sentencing laws and mass incarceration have had a devastating effect on black communities. Ex-prisoners’ loss of voting rights is the least of its effects. “Selma” is part of the campaign to divert the struggle against racist capitalism into the sham of the ballot box.
The “All of Us or None” project shows how capitalists use reforms to strengthen their system. Building illusions that capitalism can be reformed, this campaign diverts angry youth and older workers from the real cause of racism—the capitalist system itself.
A communist society, eliminating money and wage slavery, will allow us to end racism. Masses in motion against racist police murder give us an opportunity to expose the essentially racist nature of capitalism and the urgent need for communist revolution. In the mass movement, Red Flag must expose the ruling class strategy of “voting rights” for what it is—a sham that ties us to the bosses’ racist system.
More Red Flag readers, more discussions of the real roots of racist cop terror, more youth and workers building ICWP are what we need to organize for the communist revolution which will put an end to racism, capitalism and the cops once and for all
I deliver pizzas. Recently I called a customer to say I was at the door. Suddenly five young black males came up behind me with a gun and said, “Drop the pizza!” They robbed five pizzas, some chicken wings, and my phone and wallet. There wasn’t much in my wallet because the pizza company robs my time and labor. I was more angry than scared.
I am also a young black male. I was thinking that these guys were actually hungry enough to point a gun just for some pizza. Later I realized that we’ve been in competition with each other since Day One that capitalism hit the planet.
Because of the lack of jobs in minority communities, the only options young people see are to steal what you need or if you are “lucky” maybe get a crappy job like I have. The only other real option is to fight for communism.
In communism we will all have food to eat without stealing it. Young people will have lots of opportunities to do useful work and have self-respect and respect for each other.
I’ve been looking for a job in industry or transportation for close to two years, so far without luck. With communism it would be a given.
—Big Red
