From CPD to ICE — Smash Racist State Terror

CHICAGO, June 23—Comrades from Progressive Labor Party here deepened our connections to the working class, taking an active role in two anti-racist events organized through local mass organizations. Current personal ties were strengthened while new ones were made, as we boldly connected the struggles to the need for communist revolution and the dictatorship of the working class.
Reform and revolution
The first action that we participated in took place in the south side neighborhood of Bronzeville, an area where the Party has been working to build a bigger base among workers. Bronzeville has been a Black working-class neighborhood for decades, and has a proud history of anti-racist fight-back and communist organizing. However, like many areas of the city, the neighborhood is gentrifying rapidly as the racist real estate bosses seek to make a land grab through their connections to the city’s liberal politicians.
Bronzeville was also home to Maurice Granton Jr, the 24-year-old Black father who was murdered at the hands of the racist Chicago Police Department (CPD) on June 6 (see CHALLENGE, 6/27). Since the capitalist state-sanctioned murder of Maurice, our Party collective has been pushing to spend even more time near the Green Line train stop where he was killed in order to connect with friends, family, and other workers who are interested in organizing a response.
An organization fighting for a civilian-based police review board for the city had also planned to be in the neighborhood to show support for Maurice and engage community members with their reform petition. Several comrades have been active within this group and make calls for a revolutionary line while building the reform struggle. In turn, members of the reform group, including workers affected by racist mass incarceration and kkkop torture, have spoken at Party events about their struggles against the bosses’ attacks.
Both PLP and the reform group were able to supplement one another and turn up in the neighborhood. We shared the bullhorn to give speeches, and canvassed the block to get workers’ contact information and distribute literature. Many expressed thanks for our openly anti-racist, anti-CPD presence in their are. More workers wanted to organize a march to demand justice for Maurice from CPD and the city bosses.
Conservative and liberal bosses both anti-immigrant
That afternoon, PL’ers travelled north to the Rogers Park neighborhood to participate in a demonstration against the Trump administration’s openly fascist spike in separating immigrant working families at the U.S.-Mexico border (see editorial, page 2).
Although this demonstration was considerably larger than the previous action, the politics were weaker. Many speakers pushed voting in the upcoming midterm elections as a “solution,” suggesting that the way to fight back against racist deportations and fascist state terror is to “build a blue wave” in the state.
As communists, we must attack the racist liberal politicians from the left, exposing their role in pushing anti-immigrant, anti-worker violence. Many of the immigrant detention centers that imprison the separated children today were constructed under Obama.
Voting under capitalism will never change the essence of this violence; all that really changes are faces of our oppressors. Communist revolution, led by a mass international PLP that smashes the bosses’ state and replaces it with an egalitarian worker-run society, remains the only way out.
Although given our size, we couldn’t dramatically alter the tone of this rally, we still made an impact. Many marchers complimented our t-shirts linking CPD to the fascist ICE, and were willing to take CHALLENGE and engage in conversation. More plans were made for another rally in an area of the city with a larger immigrant worker presence, in which more comrades plan to participate.
Dig deep to build revolution
The impact that we were able to generate by participating in the actions highlights the importance of continuing to “dig deep” and build a base within working-class communities and the mass movement. There are no real shortcuts in the path to communist revolution; just constant struggle and evaluation.
Killer cops gunning down Black youth in the streets of Chicago and thousands of Central American children and their parents detained in concentration camps are all connected. They are all part of the daily violence of capitalism. Our duty remains to keep connecting these fights into the broader revolutionary struggle against the profit system and the building of workers’ power.