NEW YORK CITY, November 20—The liberal NYC Council voted to close the Rikers Island prison complex, which has hounded mainly Black and Latin workers since 1935. Four new houses of horrors are expected to take its place. While capitalism unleashes its terror machine on Black and Latin workers, the communist movement looks to these oppressed workers as potential leaders for a just world, communism.
Prisons necessary for capitalism
Rikers is a massive complex of 10,000 beds. It currently holds around 7,000 daily and is now slated to close by 2026. As crime rates continue to fall, these liberal politicians still cling to the stick of the police and the courts to maintain their status quo. Rikers Island, one of the most racist, vile institutions, preys on and imprisons workers and is bad for all but the rulers.
Capitalism is guilty of murder
Under the liberal bastion of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Kalief Browder, a young Black man was robbed of his youth when he was sent to rikers as a teenager and held for three years with no court date on suspicion of stealing a backpack. After spending a majority of that time in solitary confinement, he was released. Unable to cope with the trauma that capitalism inflicted on him, he committed suicide. This is just one documented experience that reflects the racist terrorization of Black and Latin youth under capitalism. Kalief Browder, the Exonerated 5, and the youth being harassed in recent years by the MTA police (see last issue of CHALLENGE) is why we fight to smash racism.
Under the system of capitalism, the police, jails, and courts exist to keep workers separated, scared, and docile. At an outrageous cost of both resources and suffering, these new prisons will displace workers only to lock them back up for the sake of control.
Reform vs revolution
Workers are in motion against the new prisons, but without widespread working-class unity and a communist party, these efforts are doomed to fail. One protest was in Kew Gradens, Queens, where the Mayor plans to build a towering lockup for more than 1,400 inmates.
Capitalism disregards workers’ safety; our labor can be lawfully commodified and sold. When the main wing of the U.S. bosses abolished slavery, they still kept a loophole: “…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…” In other words, prison labor. Every imprisoned worker is one less visible voice of dissent in the face of the bosses.
Working for a better world
Currently under this racist capitalist system, Black, Latin, and women workers are the most brutally exploited. Capitalist bosses dehumanize workers using this special oppression. They use their state apparatus,especially the police to terrorize workers, and protect their bosses, politicians. But the main reason the bosses use racist terror is to divide workers. The capitalist’s biggest fear is multi-racial unity, and working class leadership. They shudder at the thought of workers breaking their shackles and taking power. Under communism, the working class will have the power to make and enforce all of the laws which society operates under. The working class will hold all decision-making power for its own call.
Only when the international working class holds power over their own lives can we expect to cultivate a world without racism, sexism, and all the lies that divide us. Under communism, crimes against the working class will be tackled by our class, for our class, with our class.
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Liberal venom comes in many flavors
Liberal misleaders are not all united behind this Rikers plan either: “In a sign perhaps of the challenges and opposition ahead, Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents parts of Brooklyn, said the legislation did not go far enough to address the reasons people end up in jail. ‘This vote only enriches developers in the short term,’ said Mr. Menchaca, who voted against the proposal. ‘I do not trust this mayor, do you?’” (New York Times, 10/17).
Let’s not be fooled by Menchaca, the City’s first Mexican American to hold public office. This councilperson will play a role in ushering in gentrification and displacement of Latin and other workers. Industry City (it was once a manufacturing complex) has been redeveloped into a campus of companies. Despite his big talk about hurting residents, Menchaca is moving forward with Industry City’s $1 billion rezoning application, which will upzone “20 percent of the neighborhood’s industrial waterfront property” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11/7).
Menchaca, and other liberals like him, still serve capitalism. In fact, they serve the most dangerous wing of the U.S. ruling class: the Big Fascists. This wing has the U.S. global Empire, in mind when enacting policies and buying working-class votes. They are Big Fascists because they pose a more lethal threat to the working class than Trump and his brand of domestic Little Fascism. The Big Fascists will use the working class to discipline their national enemy. In doing so, they will also aim to steer the direction of working-class movements and funnel them into a war effort against China and Russia. This is the fascist apparatus that Menchaca and Co. are a part of.