Rulers’ Plan: Turn Rebels into Soldiers

The cops are one of the capitalist state’s tools of oppression, an essential instrument to terrorize workers and deter  fightback against racism and inequality. But the history of class struggle shows that police atrocities also expose the bosses’ vulnerability. They spark anti-racist rebellion. They bring us closer to the revolution that will smash this brutal system once and for all.     
The latest example of this contradiction came when working-class youth in Baltimore rebelled against capitalist exploitation and the racist murder of Freddie Gray. In a frantic move to turn down the heat, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby brought criminal charges against six cops involved in the modern-day lynching. (Three of them are Black.) Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic Party candidate for president in 2016, is vowing to reform “justice” in the United States, notably a prison system that locks up a higher proportion of Black men than South Africa’s at the height of apartheid.
But make no mistake: these charges and promises will do nothing to end the scourge of cop terror. All politicians serve one capitalist faction or another; all rely on the police to enforce the racist segregation that divides our class. They need cops to attack strikers and protect the bosses‘ super-profits that depress all wages by paying Black and Latin families $612 billion less yearly in income than white families (PEW Research Center). In addition, cop terror and the school-to-prison
pipeline in poor neighborhoods act to lower wages even further. These racist policies create a desperate army of unemployed youth who are forced to work for poverty pay.  
When liberal politicians like Mosby and Clinton try to pacify workers’ anger, they reflect the dominant finance capital wing’s concern about threats to the capitalist order. As the U.S. ruling class prepares to challenge its main imperialist rivals, China and Russia, it needs to gain the allegiance of working-class youth, the people who fight the bosses’ wars. Mass alienation and anti-racist anger would doom the U.S. capitalists to defeat, as they saw all too clearly in Vietnam.
The Progressive Labor Party stands firmly with the youth who rebelled against the system in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Ferguson, Missouri, and in dozens of other cities in the U.S. and around the world. We call upon workers everywhere to follow their example, under the banner of communism — the only system where racist murders, unemployment, sexism and all the evils of capitalism have no place.
Prosecution and Pacification
Mosby’s decision to charge the cops who murdered Freddie Gray — in contrast to the free pass given the killers in Ferguson — is tied to the agenda of the dominant U.S. capitalist wing. The charge is being led by arch-imperialist George Soros, the liberal billionaire whose life’s mission is to make sure the U.S. is ready for war against Russia or China.
Soros bankrolls the Open Society Institute (OSI), which seeks to channel anti-capitalist rage into war-bent, pro-U.S. sentiment in strategic areas around the world. The OSI has funneled millions of dollars to potential anti-capitalist hot spots, from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring countries in the Middle East. In Ferguson alone, the organization spent $33 million after the racist murder of Mike Brown (Daily Mail, 1/15/15). In Ukraine, the OSI has fervently supported the
CIA-backed leadership in its conflict with Russia. Soros is hoping to influence the trajectory of Baltimore’s unrest in a similar way.
Soros has found an ally in Mosby, whose assistant prosecutor, Portia Wood, has served on OSI-Baltimore’s Leadership Council since 2008. On May 3, the New York Times, the U.S. bosses’ leading daily paper, published Baltimore-based activist Sonja Sohn’s reaction to Mosby’s move: “On Friday, one city official seemed to finally answer the desperate pleas of poor Baltimore residents.” It’s probably no coincidence that Sohn’s Baltimore Wake Up project also cashes OSI checks.
But problems have already surfaced with Mosby’s prosecution. She acted in such haste to please her capitalist masters that she may have undermined her chances of convicting the six killer kkkops, always a long shot in the rigged “justice” system. Technical questions have arisen over whether a knife allegedly found in Freddie Gray’s possession was a switchblade. (Not that the knife had anything to do with his being arrested without cause or subsequently traumatized into a coma while inside a police van.) In addition, it appears that the charges filed by Mosby’s office may have mistakenly identified a plumber and an elementary school cafeteria manager instead of two of the cops (Baltimore Sun, 5/4/15).  
Hillary, You Liar
In an April 29 speech at Columbia University, self-styled humanitarian Hillary Clinton said, “What we’ve seen in
Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul.” She proposed a thorough reform of the criminal “justice” system — an end to mass incarceration, an overhaul of mandatory minimum sentences. But Clinton, too, works for imperialist U.S. interests. The policy-shaping think tank she co-founded, the Center for American Progress (CAP), is bankrolled by Soros, Citigroup, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Its board includes Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, who once said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children from U.S. sanctions throughout the 1990s were “worth it.”
Clinton’s anti-jailing stance stems from a March 23 CAP report, “Expanding Opportunities in America’s Urban Areas,” which notes that up to 100 million U.S. workers — as many as one in three — have a criminal record. Like her capitalist patrons, Clinton is worried that these millions will have no stake in fighting for a system that robs them of freedom and job prospects.
In her Columbia speech, Clinton spoke of “alternative punishment” to jail. Clinton wants to unpack prisons to fill the barracks. She failed to mention, however, that it was her husband, Bill Clinton, who instituted the policies that threw millions of Black and Latin men and women into the prison system in the first place. Or that it was Bill Clinton who shredded welfare, sending millions of families deeper into poverty. Hillary Clinton’s new talking points are a deceitful ploy to gain support for her presidential bid and to channel working-class youth into the military. She is singing the same tune as the Soros-funded Huffington Post. In a 2014 column, “Uncle Sam (Should) Want You: National Service vs. Mass Incarceration,” an Ohio State University professor, Steven Conn, wrote:

For roughly 30 years between 1940 and 1973 American men were drafted into the Military….[T]hat period of service helped many with their transition into adulthood, exactly at that moment when some young men wind up in the criminal justice system today. I am not suggesting a return to compulsory military service. Instead, I am suggesting that a more widely conceived program of national service might have a significant impact on crime and on the men most likely to commit it by providing them with the kind of work, structure and sense of purpose that is missing for too many of them.

From Rebellion to Communist Revolution
Workers in Baltimore and worldwide should beware of reformers’ attempts to “fix” the exploitation of capitalism.  As long as society is run by and for profit, racism, sexism,
unemployment, and imperialist slaughter can only get worse. The one way to rid the world of these plagues is to organize under the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party. PLP fights to lead the working class to smash the system in its entirety. We will create the only society that values every life — a communist society.