The following editorial has been written by comrades in Mexico to warn the international working class about the dangers of identity politics and liberalism.
From Atlanta, Georgia to Oaxaca, Mexico, the capitalist bosses are using identity politics and sell-out misleaders to try to pacify the angry masses. But as millions have rebelled around the world, more and more demonstrators are seeing that the problem isn’t just a few “bad” cops. Racist violence is an integral part of the capitalists’ racist profit system, a state apparatus that protects the bosses’ profits by exploiting, dividing, and terrorizing the international working class.
Amid a global pandemic and economic depression, as the rulers’ callous greed and glaring weaknesses are exposed, many protesters are embracing communist ideas. They’re coming to see that all politicians and cops are our class enemies, regardless of their skin color. And that only a mass, multiracial organization, led by communist politics and the most militant Black and Latin workers, can smash the capitalist system, the source of all racism and inequality. Our inspirational unity in this fightback is the bosses’ worst nightmare.
A lynching in Atlanta
On June 15, the racist Atlanta police shot to death a 27-year-old Black man, Rayshard Brooks. His crime? Falling asleep in his car in the drive-through lane at a Wendy’s restaurant. The cops’ lynching of Brooks reignited the anger of Black, Latin, Asian, and white workers, who burned the restaurant to the ground.
The U.S. finance capital Big Fascists are desperately straining to quell the revolt by channeling it into electoral politics and promoting Black politicians who serve the racist bosses and their system. In Atlanta, the most prominent misleaders include Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Congressman John Lewis, and former Mayor Andrew Young, who recently invoked the racist slogan “All Lives Matter” and recalled the time he attempted a “reconciliation” with members of the Ku Klux Klan (New York Times, 6/19).
These bosses’ puppets are much like the Black politicians in South Africa, who work hand in hand with the old white apartheid ruling class to keep exploiting and killing Black workers. They promote the lie that the working class can fight the bosses’ racism by electing politicians who “look like them.”
The politicians’ opportunism is nothing new. Shortly after the current rebellion was sparked by the May 25 strangulation murder of George Floyd, a massive and integrated group of young workers took to the Atlanta streets. They burned a police precinct and attacked the offices of CNN, whose founder, Ted Turner, is a billionaire backer of Bottoms. Instead of blaming her police for viciously assaulting the protesters, the mayor berated Black youth for the violence. She was following the playbook of ex-Stooge in Chief Barack Obama, who attacked the young Baltimore rebels as “thugs” after the cops executed 25-year-old Freddie Gray in 2015.When the young Atlanta rebels ignored Bottoms and the demonstrations kept growing, she was forced to fire six cops caught on tape tasering two Black college students and dragging them out of their car. A local Black prosecutor then brought murder charges against killer kkkop Garrett Rolfe, who shot Brooks twice in the back. In a racist response, dozens of Atlanta police—the so-called “good cops”—called in sick to protest.
Last year, when workers weren’t out in the streets, Bottoms showed her true loyalties after a Black police officer on her own security detail shot and killed an 18-year-old Black youth, D’Ettrick Griffin, for sliding into the cop’s unoccupied, unmarked car at a gas station. With the mayor’s backing, the cop, Oliver Simmonds, was let off by the district attorney. It didn’t matter that Atlanta specifically forbids the police from shooting at unarmed people, even if they’re fleeing (AJC, 2/8/2019). Bottoms then rewarded the police with a salary increase to “allow them to live in the city of Atlanta” (CBS News, 6/18). As if having killers as our neighbors makes us safer!
Atlanta is a majority-Black city with an uninterrupted string of Black mayors since 1974. Together they have cleared the way for gentrification by pushing out Black workers (AJC, 5/9/2019). Though the city is known as a haven for Black capitalists, it has the worst racist inequality of any city in the U.S. In 2018, the “lowest 20 percent in Atlanta earned an average of $9,400, while the highest 20 percent brought home more than $256,000.” The majority of the local Black working class lives in poverty (Statista.com, 11/27/2019).
AMLO punches right
In Mexico, the bosses have used identity politics to put down workers’ fury and rebellion against extreme poverty and racist attacks against our class. In recent weeks, we’ve seen the assassinations by cops of Giovanni Lopez, a construction worker from Jalisco, for the “crime” of not wearing a face mask, and of Alexander Martinez, a 16-year-old from Oaxaca. In Mexico City, riot police kicked a young woman of 16 until she was unconscious and hospitalized. All were casualties of the class war between the oppressed, the excluded, and the debt-ridden, on the one hand, and those who protect the bosses and write the laws to guarantee the capitalists’ maximum profit, on the other.
The fightback against these killers and their governing accomplices has been blunted by the popularity of the fake-leftist Morena Party and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Trading on his identity as a mestizo, a person of mixed indigenous and European ancestry, AMLO has exploited the despair of the poorest of the population, who live day after day with the violence of the cartels and mining companies and ruthless bosses. The president has deployed the National Guard (NG) as a false promise of “public safety” from corrupt politicians and federal police who collude with drug traffickers. Formed out of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, and the federal police, the NG is a forceful warrior battalion that for decades has committed abuses against the population while smashing social protest.
As AMLO rivals U.S. Terrorist in Chief Donald Trump for mishandling the Covid-19 crisis, and racist capitalist inequality in Mexico only gets worse, the president makes phony speeches against capitalism. AMLO feints with his left and punches the working class with his right. His façade as a self-made “common man,” based in part on his mestizo identity, has deceived large sections of the working class to support big-money ruling class projects—like the Trans-Isthmus Corridor and the Mayan Train—that previous presidents only dreamt of.
A massacre in Oaxaca
In 2006, in Oaxaca, the working class experienced firsthand the danger of being represented by and supporting mestizo politicians. After teachers led a massive rebellion for improved working conditions throughout the Central Valley, and gained control of Oaxaca City, they were violently suppressed by an intervention of the military, disguised as police officers. But in reality, the movement’s fatal weakness was the influence of class traitors like Santiago Chepi and Flavio Sosa, who assumed leadership within the teachers’ movement and ultimately diverted the strength of the rebellion into negotiations with the government (https://tinyurl.com/y9dnamro). Like most teachers in Oaxaca, Chepi and Sosa came from working-class mestizo families. After betraying the movement and bringing it back under the bosses’ control, Chepi and Sosa promised to push for reforms as elected representatives in Oaxaca’s municipal government. After accomplishing nothing, Chepi and Sosa created more false hope and then widespread cynicism through the election of sell-out liberals like Gabino Cue as governor of the state of Oaxaca, a disaster for the working class. Cue intensified the bosses’ attack against the teachers, which culminated in the 2016 massacre at Nochixtlan. After teachers and students’ parents blocked highways, the police slaughtered at least six workers and injured more than a hundred more (La Jornada, 12/19/16).
Unite in communist solidarity
For the future of our class, workers in the current anti-racist movement must reject the bosses’ use of identity politics that leads to pacifism, liberal fascism, and inter-imperialist war against our class sisters and brothers. We have a better alternative: to unite with Progressive Labor Party and pour all of our anger and energy into building a multiracial, multigenerational party of women and men, Black, Latin, Asian, and white. To build an international communist party that brings us shoulder to shoulder against a system that oppresses and kills in the interests of capital.
We are dedicated to fighting for the international working class. Through our newspaper, CHALLENGE, our study groups and cadre schools, but most of all through political leadership in struggle with masses of anti-racist workers, PLP keeps alive the flame of communist ideas from Oaxaca to Atlanta, from Bogota to Mexico City and beyond. Don’t vote, revolt! Join Progressive Labor Party!