CHICAGO, April 13—Antiracist mass struggle is heating up across the city in the wake of the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) racist murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) called for communist revolution as the solution to racist state terror that is essential to capitalism.
Adam was a student and resident of Little Village, a west side neighborhood that is home to mainly Latin workers. On March 29, allegedly responding to gunfire, the racist attack dogs of CPD chased Adam and another young person into an alley near a school where they cornered Adam and shot him in the chest.
It was when the morgue called to identify Adam’s body two days later that Elizabeth Toledo was made aware of her son’s death. In a sick throwback to the dashboard camera cover-up of Black teen LaQuan McDonald’s racist murder in 2014, CPD and the city bosses, fronted by racist, liberal wolf in sheep’s clothing Mayor Lori Lightfoot, have held off on the release of the killer kkkop’s body-cam footage. They know they are sitting on a ticking time bomb of working class rage.
PLP calls on our working class sisters and brothers to keep rebelling against this racist capitalist system that killed Adam just as it kills countless other workers and youth every day. We invite workers everywhere to take the next step: joining our mass international Party in order to crush capitalism and its endless misery, inequality, and war.
Take the streets for Adam
A few days after Adam’s murder, on April 5, close to 200 protesters, mostly young people, gathered for a community vigil in Little Village in his honor. Many workers and friends of Adam took to the mic, voicing their disgust for the racist murder of a child by the KKK-in-blue.
A PL’er took the opportunity to share communist politics, exposing the role of the police under capitalism for being assassins and terrorists in a rousing bullhorn speech. We ran out of CHALLENGE newspapers and 200 bilingual leaflets, which explained that only communist revolution can rid society of killer racist cops, and build a world where children and all workers flourish, achieving our full potential.
Many agreed that no one is safe under this bloody capitalist dictatorship. As history has shown, we cannot depend on the courts for justice. As long as capitalism exists, the cops will always be used as tools for social control and repression, especially to attack Black and Latin workers.
A couple of “community groups” funded by the police tried to take over the leadership of this struggle. These non-profit groups are used to try and keep a lid on workers’ anger, and to mislead workers into dead-end movements like electoral politics. It’s the Party’s role to expose these misleaders and build unity with the rank and file against our common class enemies and their agents.
A young Latin worker, who called out the non-profits, approached a PL’er and said he had taught him at an after-school program when he was 12 years old. This shows how important our relationships are, and what we do really counts! We plan to follow up with him.
After the more pacifist vigil, community members upped the ante with a bold march through the neighborhood. Residents pumped their fists in the air as we shouted militant chants like “CPD, KKK! How many kids did you kill today?!” The kkkops trying to corral the march were quickly shouted down and forced to retreat. We ended blocking a busy intersection, where working-class Black and Latin youth made anti-racist speeches and openly attacked both liberal misleaders like Lightfoot as well as the police and the capitalist state.
Caravan held back by nationalism, identity politics
A few days later, on April 9, dozens of young workers and students gathered in North Lawndale, another west side neighborhood that is home to majority Black workers. It is the same neighborhood where workers rebelled after CPD murdered 15-year old Black teen Steven Rosenthal in 2018. After a spirited rally in which PL’ers and other workers condemned this racist system, there was a car procession through mainly working-class neighborhoods, ending up downtown.
While downtown, protesters got out of their cars and blocked another intersection. Some protesters called for Black, Latin and Asian unity as a response to racism. Others carried nationalist Black and Mexican flags. These nationalist politics stem from the identity politics pushed in many boss-led or boss-influenced organizations. These ideas will not liberate the working class or end racist police murder.
Identity politics calls for workers to rally around more Black and Latin leaders—to manage the bosses’ state. But in Chicago, a very segregated, racist city, we have a Black mayor and a Black police chief, and racist police killings have not stopped.
As communists, we build the fight for international, multiracial working-class unity as the antidote to the bosses’ racist divisions and state violence. Capitalism needs racism, nationalism, and sexism in order to exist—as workers we need to reject all of these with egalitarian communist politics!
Workers deserve a communist world
The murder of Adam Toledo is connected to the racist murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Daunte Wright. It is connected to the mounting death toll of the pandemic, and the endless drone attacks against workers in other countries. All are the deadly reality of capitalism.
The justice we seek cannot and will not be found as long as capitalism exists! Let’s build the communist world we all need and deserve!
*****
SIDEBAR
Why do kkkops kill?
Legalized killings and mass imprisonment are age-old capitalist tools to control the working class. The first modern police force in what is now the United States, beginning in South Carolina in 1704, was the slave patrol. These forces hunted down and punished runaway and “defiant” enslaved workers; they were a form of organized terror to deter revolts that might threaten plantation profits.
To this day, state-sanctioned racist terror against Black workers and youth is an indispensable weapon for the capitalist class. Anti-Black racism is at the foundation of the racist treatment and division of all workers. Therefore, it is in the principled interest of all workers to unite against the capitalist state.
Under capitalism, the “state”—including all levels of government, the so-called justice system, the police, the military, the schools, and the media—is an instrument of ruling-class oppression and violence against the working class. Past communist leader Vladimir Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, “The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.”
We didn’t negotiate the end of slavery and we won’t negotiate our way out of capitalism. From slave patrols to the kkkops, the bosses’ state is the sworn enemy of the working class. Smash the capitalist state!