Uproar Over City’s Racist Prison Project

INDIANA, February 11—Progressive Labor Party members giving communist leadership in a multiracial Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest here succeeded in disrupting board meetings at the local airport and zoning meetings at City Hall.
A local mayor’s support for a bid to privatize a prison has since been retracted, a small but significant victory for this integrated group of anti-racist fighters.
Reform victories under capitalism are by nature temporary. The limits of this one are plain to see: while a petition to build the prison within city limits has been retracted, the jailers continue to hunt around the Chicago metro area for a site to construct their new concentration camp.
For the past 30 years, this region has been crippled with purposeful de-industrialization and unemployment. This attack on jobs has a racist edge that cuts all working people. On the heels of communist-led union and militant antiracist fightback from the 1930s to the 1960s, for the first time tens of thousands of industrial jobs were opened in a major way to Black workers in this region. Capitalism’s drive for maximum profit has driven many of these jobs overseas and left the remaining positions saddled with “two-tier” wage structures that lock out future generations from more decent living wages inherited from past class struggles.
Mayor Defends Racist Prisons
After a re-election (in which a little more than one-tenth of over 80,000 residents participated), the mayor released a statement saying she was in full support of the corporation’s plan to build this prison camp close to a nearby airport. This liberal misleader initially defended her support of the prison by repeating the jailer’s unsubstantiated claim that it would bring 200-300 jobs to the city.  In her own words she “visited at least one of those facilities and they seem to treat people in a very respectful way.” This claim was made in spite of the numerous complaints against Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons for the vicious treatment of inmates, ranging from physical and sexual abuse to labor exploitation.
Some local fighters were surprised that she gave her upfront support to a prison project at a time when the racist mass incarceration of Black workers is widespread. In meetings and one-on-one conversations, PL’ers explained that the prison profiteers and the mayor were counting on the likelihood that residents in a predominantly Black city would buy into the faulty racist notion that immigration is “just a Mexican issue.”
The struggle against this prison was waged by a multiracial antiracist coalition of fighters in the city. A major theme in the fightback was that of working-class solidarity among Black, Latin and white workers.
Leaders of these groups stated that the people of our town would not become “slave catchers,” hunting Latin workers in the same fashion that Blacks had historically been hunted during slavery and continue to be treated by cops in our city.
Raising Communism Among the Masses
At mass meetings, a PLP member gave speeches about how change on a local level would not permanently stop businesses like the one we are facing or stop police killings. Only smashing the profit-over-people capitalist system will bring about true change for workers. The comrade said that voting was a bosses’ tool to keep people complacent about their oppression, while spreading the illusion that they have actually done something in their own interests. After the forum, we distributed CHALLENGE.
The ongoing struggle inside the group is to increase our interaction with community members. Our local communist-led Black Lives Matter group conflicts with the BLM’s national leadership and is proving that multi-racial unity in the fight against racism is crucial.
Having made contacts within the community via public meetings and knocking on doors, a more determined effort to build personal ties between those inside the BLM chapter and the PLP is our next order of business. The people in our neighborhoods are mindful of the strangle-hold that capitalism has over our lives. When we push the idea that only a mass movement of workers united to smash the racist and sexist system of capitalism — not liberal concessions — will end our suffering, our friends want to hear more. As we build class struggle together, these conversations will continue.