Black Lives Matter Convention: PL’ers Push Back vs. Nationalists

CLEVELAND, July 26 — At the first Black Lives Matter (BLM) convention, as our Black, white, and South Asian comrades chanted “Racism means we got to fight back!” a group of people tried to rip the bullhorn from our hands. They apparently were outraged by a multiracial group like the Progressive Labor Party leading anti-racist chants.
Our opposition wasn’t the Klan. It wasn’t the cops. It was a leaders of Black Lives Matter.
A seemingly progressive, grass-roots organization, Black Lives Matter is in reality backed by arch-imperialist George Soros, the Kellogg Foundation (champions of anti-student education reform), and the Ford Foundation, the philanthropic front group for the Hitler-backing corporation that oppresses workers throughout the world. Given their vested interest in maintaining global capitalism, these funders must keep workers divided to continue to maximize profits. Within BLM, they have found some willing junior partners to promote working-class division, capitalist-controlled elections, and the reactionary ideology of Black nationalism as a false solution to racist police murders and poverty.
BLM’s leadership exposed their anti-worker ideas when they attacked our multiracial group of comrades. Multiracial fightback to smash capitalism—led by the revolutionary communist PLP—is the only solution to racism and poverty. It is the only real threat to capitalists like Soros, Kellogg, and Ford.
The Poison of Privilege Politics
BLM’s leadership attempts to mislead workers into believing that racism is a Black issue that white people cannot fully understand. Since white workers benefit from “white privilege,” as this faulty reasoning goes, their only incentive to fight racism is a moral one—a modern version of the “white man’s burden.” Ignoring the crucial role that racism plays in the exploitation of white workers, BLM asks Black workers and their “white allies” to organize separately in their own communities.
But despite the BLM leadership’s call for a Black-only conference, a dozen Black, white, and South Asian PL comrades from New York, Indiana, Chicago, and DC showed up here. When we entered the conference, the leadership asked our white comrades to leave and wait for them to create a “white ally” space.  We remained as one group and attended the workshops, where the leadership consistently attacked the white people simply for being there (see letters, page 6).
If left unchallenged, these attacks would create the illusion that the fight against racism is for Black workers alone. In reality, racism oppresses all workers while super-exploiting Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers. It uses racist distinctions and divisions to drive all workers’ wages down. By focusing workshops on the question of the white comrades’ presence, BLM’s leaders distracted everyone from fighting the system and toward fighting each other.
Black Workers Embrace Communist Ideas
Despite these attacks, many attendees supported our multiracial group.  We distributed our literature and held a forum on fighting capitalism with multiracial unity. The forum was a success, with people showing openness to our ideas and even giving us contact information and subscribing to CHALLENGE.
Perhaps our biggest gain was in the experience of engaging the class enemy. All of the PL’ers were young and gained leadership experience. Moreover, we now have a sharper view of today’s Black nationalism and identity politics. We’ve seen it proliferate in our textbooks and classrooms, but we deepened our political understanding by confronting it in practice. We all need to understand how to combat the wide variety of capitalist ideas and better fight for revolutionary communism.
The leaders of Black Lives Matter are not serious about fighting racism. If they were, they wouldn’t be taking money from the same people who create, perpetuate, and depend on racism to reap super-profits. They wouldn’t be doing the bosses’ job by creating divisions between honest Black and white workers who share the same interests. They wouldn’t be holding a conference where they focus more on attacking a multiracial group of anti-racists than on organizing for the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.
Progressive Labor Party, not Black Lives Matter, is the only group serious about eliminating racism, poverty, and capitalism. All workers must fight together to smash our chains. Join us!