Florida vigilante George Zimmerman stalked and murdered unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Yet on July 13, a Florida jury found Zimmerman not guilty. Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury of six — and by capitalism. Hypocrite Barack Obama, after saying that Martin resembled his imaginary son, okayed the verdict: The law must be obeyed. Under capitalism, of course, laws are enacted to enforce the bosses’ profit system. Obama is the enforcer-in-chief who just recommended NY Police chief Ray Kelly for the Homeland Security post because he did an “Extraordinary Job”
The racist triggerman didn’t act as a lone, self-appointed executioner. The admitted cop wannabe followed U.S. rulers’ official (if unstated) fascist rules for police: a) Assume that all black and Latino youth are criminals; and b) Shoot to kill.
New York City’s killer cops are a leading example of the top-down, systematic terror campaign that Zimmerman mimicked. In a secret recording exposed in March, Deputy Inspector Christopher MacCormack, one of the top cops in the Bronx, told a police officer to stop-and-frisk “black males 14 to 21.” On average, the NYPD stops and frisks each and every young black or Latino male two to three times a year. Within the last 18 months, the city’s “finest” have shot dead Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, and Kimani Gray, all young and black, without cause, along with Reynaldo Cuevas, a 20-year-old grocery worker who’d escaped an armed robbery at his store.
These racist killings are hardly restricted to New York. They include Oscar Grant in Oakland, 18-year-old Lamon Khiry Haslip in Riverside, California (who was shot by cops while handcuffed), and Antwoyn Johnson in Chicago.
Racist U.S. Rulers Killing Workers Worldwide
The U.S. spreads racist murder internationally. U.S. corporations like Walmart and Gap thrive off the exploitation and killing of garment workers in Bangladesh. Millions of workers and youth are victims of U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones are just the latest weapons to kill civilian workers indiscriminately.
The outrageous Zimmerman verdict reflects an intensifying racist assault by beleaguered U.S. capitalists upon the entire international working class. The rulers’ profit rate is falling because they are losing global market share, mainly to China. Their costly Iraq and Afghanistan invasions aren’t paying out the oil and gas windfalls they’d hoped for. As a result, U.S. bosses must shift their problems onto the backs of workers and youth like Trayvon Martin. They do this in three ways:
Drastically cutting jobs, wages and social services to shore up shrinking capital.
Suppressing rebellion against these attacks by unleashing racist police terror on the segment hit the hardest, black and Latino youth.
Misleading white workers to blame their own worsening plight on fellow working-class victims instead of the real capitalist culprits. This division among workers, coupled with a lack of anti-racist fightback, enabled the bosses to cut white and black industrial workers’ wages in half. Obama led the charge by imposing these cuts at General Motors after a temporary government takeover and bailout. It became clearer than ever that racism hurts white workers as well.
Stop-and-frisk and police murders are but the latest examples of the racism of U.S. capitalism. The United States and its economic growth were founded on racism, from the genocide that murdered millions of Native Americans, to the enslavement of black workers on the cotton plantations of the South, to the KKK-driven Jim Crow laws that exploited, lynched and otherwise killed masses of black workers after the Civil War.
No Justice under Capitalism
Along with the cops, the courts are an integral part of the bosses’ state power. In the Zimmerman case, the judge ruled that racial profiling could not be used as evidence against the racist killer and excluded it from the case. Passing new laws cannot help the working class, since all laws are enacted to protect the profit system at all costs. Nor will electing “better” politicians change things for workers, since they, too, represent the bosses’ system and operate within the same framework. The pro-boss union leaders, who defend capitalism and betray workers who break the law to defend their class interests, are no better.
In protesting the Zimmerman acquittal, we must not fall into the trap of making capitalist “justice” our main demand. If a guilty verdict happened to be won against the likes of Zimmerman or any of the countless racist killer cops, the bosses’ media would use it to say “the system works.” Instead, we must focus on destroying the profit system that uses the phony concept of “race” to manipulate and exploit us.
Only communist revolution can change the conditions facing the working class. Only revolution can smash the bosses’ state power and the exploitation of their profit system. Only a revolutionary communist party, like the Progressive Labor Party, can sweep away the bosses and lead the working class into power. Joining and building PLP represents the only meaningful, lasting answer to the bosses’ attacks.
Modern Slavery
The criminalization of the working class, especially blacks and Latinos, has risen as the fortunes of U.S. capitalists have sunk. In 1960, when U.S. imperialism ruled the worldwide roost, U.S. prisons held about 350,000 inmates. Half a century later, with the population barely doubled and violent crime in sharp decline, the prison population has steadily expanded to more than 2.5 million. According to the Center for American Progress (3/12/12):
The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
Seventy percent of inmates in U.S. prison are black and Latino. According to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, more black men are behind bars or on parole or probation than were enslaved in 1850.
This racist process has nothing to do with actual crime and punishment. It derives from the ceaseless economic, political and military conflict among imperialist powers. Just after World War II, U.S. capitalists controlled 60 percent of the world’s manufacturing. Today, with the U.S. share down to 18 percent, U.S. rulers can’t afford to offer working-class people like Trayvon Martin a decent job (or education or health care). Instead, these marginalized workers are stopped, frisked, jailed, and killed. It’s no coincidence that the jobless rate for Trayvon Martin’s 16 — 19 age group stands at a crippling 44 percent for blacks — and a not-so-rosy 20 percent for whites.
Don’t Be Fooled by Bosses’ Racist Lies
Even worse, U.S. rulers exploit the inequality they themselves create to divide and weaken us with the phony concept of “race.” The Zimmerman verdict encourages white workers to pin capitalist-caused social ills on black workers. It advances the bosses’ favorite lie: that jobless, criminal, welfare-dependent black people drain the tax monies paid by white people. The corollary lie is that black workers steal white workers’ jobs.
The New York media recently have had a field day with the dubious report of a white man who said he was laid off from Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s richest investment firm. The man, according to the newspapers, stumbled drunk into a restaurant, spied a black couple, and cursed them as “n-----s” who were somehow responsible for his job loss. The black man then punched the white man, sending him to the hospital. Police, of course, arrested the black man, and the unemployed white man became an aggrieved martyr in the tabloids.
Last time we checked, however, neither black nor white workers ran Goldman.
Turn Resistance into Revolution
At some point the racist Zimmerman verdict will come back to haunt U.S. rulers. The capitalists have a long-term need to mobilize the nation for war against their imperialist rivals, but the bosses’ racist attacks on workers and freeing of a racist murderer won’t inspire patriotism among black workers.
The anti-racist anger our class expressed at the freeing of Zimmerman has the potential to evolve into a bigger movement against racism in the U.S. and worldwide. Racism can only end through smashing capitalism led by Progressive Labor Party. Only its communist politics can arm workers to challenge the bosses’ attacks. Only a united, multiracial working class can turn modest advances into outright rebellion against the ruling class. Only a mass revolutionary communist party can effectively mobilize against racist cops, organize political strikes at the point of production, and lead the charge to exterminate capitalism.
The rulers fear the potential power of the international working class to overthrow them. But even as they attempt to use racism to attack us and divide us, rebellions are spreading worldwide. In Egypt, Brazil, Turkey, Greece, Spain and Bangladesh, millions of workers are taking to the streets to oppose the ravages and injustices of capitalism. The Zimmerman verdict sparked major demonstrations of tens of thousands in at least ten cities across the U.S and worldwide.
We must turn such resistance into attacks on capitalism itself, raising the call for communist revolution as the only solution for our class. This can be accomplished only with a mass Progressive Labor Party, containing millions of workers, to lead the working class to that goal. Join us!