Letters of November 4

Bronx actions against racist terror
In the last month our Antiracist Coalition has been on the move. Almost 40 strong, we marched on the 50th Precinct, decrying their indifference to nooses and semi-automatic assault rifles found in and near Van Cortlandt Park, as well as their brutal assaults against a young Black suspect. We also demanded that no more cops be sent as first responders to calls for people in mental crisis. This provoked a huge "Blue Lives Matter" mobilization in the park days later.  We were noticed!
We were invited to speak at a Climate Justice rally at Manhattan College and detailed how centuries of capitalist agribusiness have exacerbated climate catastrophes and pandemics.
These horrors deliver racist oppression upon front-line workers who are affected worst and who are giving strong leadership in the fightback against capitalist terror, like at Standing Rock. The participants were mainly students and some faculty. Two indicated that they would like to do consistent organizing with us.
Finally, we helped to organize a vigil for justice for Breonna Taylor at a Riverdale traffic circle. Streams of rush hour travelers honked their horns in support! We met two Professional Staff Congress union members who want to work with us as well.
We fight. We grow!
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Belarus solidarity
I wanted to take the opportunity to express solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of workers and students who have been continually taking to the streets in Belarus over the past two months. They are risking arrest, torture, and even death in their protests against the corrupt and reactionary government of Alexander Lukashenko.
But even as I applaud their boldness, I’m forced to think about  how capitalism tries to force the working-class everywhere to pick sides in these “lose-lose” fights, and how we can best support them as an international communist party.
Obviously they have every reason to reject a boss like Lukashenko, an authoritarian relic of failed Soviet revisionism, who is propped up with energy subsidies by the militarist Russian bosses. But on the other hand, we definitely wouldn’t support pro-U.S./pro-E.U. opposition leaders like Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Their end game if they were to be put in power would be an infusion of capitalist reforms that would only continue and likely worsen attacks like income inequality and unemployment.
The cynical U.S. and E.U. capitalist bosses only care about the “human rights” of workers in Belarus so far as the geographical location of the country is significant for their imperialist goals. Similar to how they support  (one could argue unsuccessfully) regime change in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro, their interests only lie in countering the influence of their imperialist rivals Russia and China, as they continue marching towards global conflict.
The best path forward for workers in Belarus and everywhere is to acknowledge the power we have as an international class, from Minsk to Hong Kong to Kenosha, and reject all these bosses completely. Organized into a mass international Progressive Labor Party, we can convert their upcoming world war into a class war where workers take state power and build an egalitarian communist society.  
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Capitalism & science
I have a point to add to the CHALLENGE (10/21) article The history of philosophy is written in blood about dialectical materialism.  The two trends of materialism and idealism exist together in struggle all the time. The ideas of the new society come from the class struggle within the old society. The article points out the threat to the rule of the church from the ideas of Copernicus. The Roman Catholic Church understood the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus was an official in the Catholic Church. The reason he was not persecuted was that he wrote it in Latin, which was not widely read, for use by the Church. Galileo became a threat when he wrote in Italian, which was an everyday language that would take the ideas outside the church’s control.
Within the incorrect theory of the sun revolving around the earth, there existed many accepted materialist ideas, such as the earth was round and navigation by stars. The practice and struggle between the Church and the rising capitalist class opened the door to the theory that the sun is the center of the universe, which had been around for many centuries. It was liberated with the rise of the early capitalists, who replaced the Church as the ruling class and could utilize and build on the more advanced ideas as opposed to suppressing them.
Today the mechanical materialism of capitalism is holding science back, much as the church did in the 1600’s. Capitalism is suppressing advanced ideas that debunk race and intelligence and thus threaten the bosses’ power. Communist revolution, based on dialectical materialism, will both liberate existing knowledge and open the door for a deeper understanding based on more struggle and practice.
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Book shows how liberals are biggest racist danger
The War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton does not present a class analysis, but has valuable information by showing how liberal politicians fostered mass incarceration.
People often credit President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) , with passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and  launching federal initiatives which were supposed to launch the “War on Poverty.” This is racist fiction. The next year Johnson sent to Congress the Voting Rights Act. But, just one week before that - on March 8, 1965, he presented to Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) following an urban, rebellious summer against racist police terror months prior.
America's “justice system” of prisons, jails and police has  always promoted racist terror, but this act offered a response to the “threat” the Kerner Commission would, in 1968, designate as the continuing violent rebellions that came on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement.
The LEAA undercut many Great Society programs that history texts heed as LBJ’s liberal legacy. Still today, political pundits cite liberal leaders as reasons why we should vote.
The capstone of Johnson’s Great Society was the Safe Streets Act of 1968, which invested $400 million  into the War on Crime. By 1973 this funding grew to $850 million! By 1980, Ronald Regan made this initiative far more punitive. The ruling class was able to do this given legislative proposals from Nixon and Ford which further federalized police militarization. Liberal Jimmy Carter also extended surveillance and the U.S. Border Patrol while in office.
By the beginning of the Johnson Administration, there were 184,901 mostly Black and Latin  workers in state and federal prisons. By the end of Regan’s “War on Drugs” that number grew to 436,008.  
Liberal reformer LBJ bolstered these racist policies. Republicans did not create the expansion of our fascist “justice” criminal system - it was a product of liberal welfare programs. I would also include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration's Executive Order 9066 that unapologetically interned some 120,000 Japanese into internment/concentration camps with about 2,000 who died of diseases like TB.  
In 1942, 23-year-old Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to these racist hellholes. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued that the order violated the Fifth Amendment. He lost the case to FDR’s liberal Supreme Court!
Without a historically materialist understanding, a Joe Biden vote seems like a way to fight racism. The reality is much more bleak.
A meaningful discussion and struggle with our friends is essential for organizing to fight against capitalism. A for-profit system - a system that  relies on racist and sexist oppression and divisions and a fascist “justice” criminal system against the entire working class.
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