For Walter Wallace Jr., Smash racist police terror

PHILADELPHIA, October 31—When the kkkops fired 14 shots and murdered our class brother Walter Wallace Jr., over a dozen workers answered the Progressive Labor Party’s call to bring solidarity to the masses of protesters here. This action reaffirmed the necessity of multiracial unity and international communist politics as a pivotal force for smashing racist terror. In PLP, we fight to win ourselves and the working class to build class consciousness through the lessons learned from participating in antiracist working class uprisings.
While the bosses’ media agressively promotes voting, politics based on identity, and racist divisions workers in Philly fought back against the racist murder-by-kkkop of  27-year-old Walter. Suffering from a mental episode, he needed medical workers, not the Klan-in-Blue. . This, along with the  intensifying racist conditions in Philadelphia, sparked a rebellion ending in the destruction of the bosses’ property.
Days before the election, presidential candidate Jim Crow Joe Biden turned his back on the masses in Philly when asked about his thoughts on looting at the nearby Walmart (NPR, 10/28).
Communists say workers’ actions are a reaction to the looting or violence” that the ruling class inflicts on the international working class every day. Rightfully so, during the fiercest nights of the uprisings workers ripped down Biden signs making the connection that capitalist democracy cannot challenge police terror.
From Nigeria to Philadelphia, Black workers around the world are  leading the fight of  the international working class to make the link between racist police terror and capitalism. This revolutionary working class impulse will be attacked by one set of bosses against another unless this fight to smash the bosses’ imperialist, militarized policing is transformed into an international working class fight for communism.
Mass appeal of revolutionary communist CHALLENGE
An #EndSARS protest of more than 100 workers in Newark on October 17 boosted the confidence of NJ PL’ers planning our gathering in Philadelphia. The terror that Walter Wallace Jr.’s family and community is facing mirrors the state-funded repression families battle within Nigeria. In Nigeria the Special Anti Robbery Squad (SARS) has kidnapped, raped, beaten and held hundreds of workers for ransom and killed them and their families if they failed to meet their extortionary demands.
 In Philadelphia, Cathy Wallace had called an ambulance to help with her son who was having a mental health crisis and the parasitic capitalist system’s response was armed police. The furious uprising that resulted was met with hovering helicopters, and the Democrat Mayor Jim Kenney imposing a curfew on the city twice and bringing in the National Guard.
PLP’s main contribution at both protests was to share CHALLENGE newspaper and communist ideas promoting revolutionary, class-based multiracial unity. A PL’er told a worker, “You and I, as Nigerian and Mexican workers, have more in common with each other than we do with the rich in either country. Whenever any of us are attacked, all of the international working class has to rise up. That’s what this paper is about.”
The worker from Nigeria encouraged this message to be repeated on the mic in front of the crowd. In Philly, 100 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed among a multiracial group of 1,000 workers. Our chants “From Philly to Nigeria, Racist KKKops Have Got To Go” and “Asian, Latin, Black, and White—To Smash Racism, We must Unite'' emboldened other angry workers around us to fire up their voices.
Black and Latin working class families responded with cheers from porches and sidewalks in response to the antiracist chants and newspapers.
Multiracial unity is how we win
After the protest, an article from a previous issue of CHALLENGE was used to spark conversation around identity politics. Black, white and Latin workers conducted a study group, offering questions around Black leadership and a collective analysis of identity politics.
We struggled over whether politics with a class analysis should be primary. Identity-based leaders will only cycle workers into electoral politics and nationalism. New Jersey’s Ras Baraka, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Jim Crow Joe Biden and Top KKKop Kamala Harris are no friends of our class. They only serve to win us over to nationalism and convince us to support U.S. bosses’ in wars against their inter-imperialist rivals.
Communist politics mean nothing without base building
Regardless of who did or did not submit their vote for the lesser of two evils, the capitalist system will continue to hold workers’s consciousness captive. Many workers—from Philly to Newark to Nigeria—are temporarily invested in liberal politricks and believe that those who fight to smash this system are naive. So base building in our communities for a long term struggle towards communist revolution is key. We must struggle and share communist ideas more frequently, not just react to the boss’s most intense attacks. Rise together and revolt. Join PLP today!