Capitalist Politics of Lynching

The current siege of U.S. police violence against Black and Latin workers and youth sends a dual message. On the one hand, these well-publicized atrocities  expose the racist nature of the cops and courts. Many people are led to question whether justice is possible under capitalism, a good starting point to win them to communist ideas.
On the other hand, nonstop murders by criminal cops also speed the rise of fascism. Videotapes of police assaults against Eric Garner (choked to death in Staten Island) or Walter Scott (shot in the back in South Carolina) or Tamir Rice (executed for holding a toy gun in Cleveland) are replayed on television, over and over. In virtually every case, the killer cops are either not indicted or found innocent by the capitalist injustice system. In another legalized lynching in Cleveland, 13 cops fired a total of 137 bullets as they gave chase to an unarmed Black man and woman. Only one cop was indicted; he’d fired 49 times, including 15 shots through the windshield while standing on the hood of the victims’ car after the car was stopped. He was acquitted when the judge declared there was no way to tell whose bullets were the fatal ones.
Repeated exposure to videos of police murders, coupled with no consequences for the perpetrators, sends a clear fascist message: Keep quiet, do as you’re told, and don’t fight back—or you can be murdered, too.
There is also an emphatic sexist aspect to racist terror. Under slavery and for decades thereafter, Black women were commonly assaulted, raped, and tortured by slave-owners, vigilantes, and law enforcement officials. Many women number among the cops’ murder victims; New Yorkers are familiar with the names of Eleanor Bumpurs, Shantel Davis, and Kyam Livingston. On May 16, 2010, in Detroit, seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was shot in the head by kkkop Joseph Weekley as she slept in a no-knock SWAT raid on the wrong home.
In January 2015, after the judge threw out the sole felony charge and two misdemeanor trials ended in hung juries,  Aiana’s killer went free.
Hangings and Private Property
In class society, public displays of terror have been the rulers’ stock-in-trade since antiquity. In his book The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh tells of how the poor were criminalized to enable the rising British capitalist class to impose a new concept of private property. There is a clear parallel between the treatment of impoverished white people in 18th-century England and the mass incarceration and brutalization of Black and Latin males in the U.S. today. For capitalists, spectacle murder is a time-tested tool of social control and discipline of the working class. It is designed to frighten other workers into submission and stop rebellions before they start.
Beginning in 1619, when the first Africans were brought in chains to Jamestown, Virginia, Black slaves in North America were beaten into submission. Public hangings were common. A large number were murdered outright; others were worked to death.
Many of these slaves had been warriors in their home villages, trained to fight back. The plantation owners did all they could to suppress Black leadership for rebellion. They broke up Black families and separated slaves who spoke the same African languages. They also segregated slaves from white indentured servants. The rulers knew that multiracial unity could bring their whole system crashing down; their strategy was to divide and conquer.
After the Civil War, freed slaves and poor white people took over the abandoned plantations and began to rebuild. In response, former slave owners and other white businessmen organized the Ku Klux Klan to reignite racism. Successful Black farmers were targeted and their property stolen. Trumped-up charges of rape and other offenses were used to arrest Black men and youths and throw them in jail, where lynch mobs often grabbed them before their day in kangaroo court. The white ruling class also imposed Jim Crow, a system of legal segregation of public schools and housing, buses and bathrooms, movie theaters and restaurants, swimming pools and water fountains. Jim Crow persisted well into the 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement and a wave of urban rebellions forced the federal government to outlaw segregation by law—though not, by and large, in effect.
Spectacle Murders, Then and Now
Lynchings were horrific. Victims would be tarred and feathered, mutilated, set afire and burned to death. Hundreds of racists would gather as an audience and to take home parts of the body. Between 1882 and 1968, according to archives compiled by Tuskegee University, there were 4,743 lynchings in the U.S.—a number that does not include all the people who went “missing.” About three-fourths of the victims were Black—most of them male, most in the South. These public spectacles served to foment even more intense racism and to reinforce the divide between Black and white workers, despite the fact that Southern white workers were paid far less than the national standard. Racism kept all poor people down.
The urban rebellions of the 1960s triggered a new wave of spectacle murders; cops killed Black Panthers in their beds. Today the Ku Klux Klan has been supplanted by cops, the Klan in blue. Over the first five months of 2015, according to the Washington Post (5/30/15), at least 385 people were shot and killed by police nationwide—more than twice the rate of fatal police shootings previously acknowledged by the federal government. Among the newspaper’s findings:
About half the victims were white, the other half Black or Latin. But among victims who were unarmed, two-thirds were Black or Latin.
Overall, Black people were killed by cops at three times the rate of white people, even after adjusting for the population of the census tracts where the shootings occurred.
Overall, 16 percent of the victims were either carrying a toy or were unarmed. Twenty percent of the unarmed victims were killed while trying to run away.
Eight of the dead were children younger than 18.
As of the article’s publication date, only three of the 385 fatal shootings—less than 1 percent—had resulted in a cop being charged with a crime.    
But despite the power of the state to commit and whitewash state-sanctioned racist murder, generations of workers—men and women, Black and white—have never stopped fighting back. In the late 1920s, the Communist Party USA challenged Jim Crow and led an anti-lynching campaign in the Deep South. Progressive Labor Party has consistently organized against police terror, dating back to the 1979 summer project in Tupelo, Mississippi. From Harlem and Watts to Ferguson and Baltimore, workers have drawn the line and counter-attacked police in violent urban rebellions. More than three years after Shantel Davis was shot and killed by cops as she tried to drive away, outraged workers still stage regular demonstrations in her memory—and to remind the ruling class that we do not forget.
Under the profit system, Black lives don’t matter because the capitalists need to intimidate and divide us to maintain their control. All that matters to the bosses are their super-profits. They’ve shown their willingness to kill millions—from the streets of the U.S. to the Middle East—to keep what they have and grab for more.
All workers’ lives will be valued only when a communist revolution by the international working class, led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, smashes capitalism and the racist terror it relies upon. Forward!