Armed with a military-grade assault rifle and the rulers’ racist ideas, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old monster created by capitalism, traveled 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, to murder Black people. Donned in body armor, he began firing in the parking lot at Tops Friendly Market—the only supermarket in Buffalo’s largest Black neighborhood—before walking inside. He shot 13 of our working-class brothers and sisters, 11 of them Black. Ten were killed; the killer, treated far more carefully by the kkkops than many unarmed Black workers, was arrested without a scratch.
By then the camera attached to Gendron’s helmet had livestreamed the atrocity to a popular gaming platform. Like photographs of lynchings in the early 1900s, the graphic footage found a ready audience. The butchery drew more than three million views, and was still generating revenue for Facebook a full day later. Under capitalism, the bosses’ media and social media eagerly amplify the profit system’s racist terror.
Segregation and slaughter
Racist slaughters are anything but random amid the rot and segregation of capitalist society. According to the 2020 census, there are only 48 Black people in Gendron’s hometown of Conklin, barely one  percent of the population. While it’s been widely reported that the killer waded into online cesspools of racism, Broome County and Central New York State have their own long history of racist terror (New York Times, 5/22):   
[I]n the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan briefly relocated its state headquarters from New York City to Binghamton….In 2018, swastikas were found spray-painted on walls at Binghamton High School. Last winter, a Black teacher at Windsor High School, a short drive from Conklin, complained after students in the mostly white community dressed in racist costumes for a “Gangsta Night” at a school basketball game. And in Oneonta, a rural community between Binghamton and Albany, two students were filmed firing a gun at a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. while shouting racial slurs…
[A]fter the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, racial tensions ran high again in Binghamton….Hundreds turned out to protest in June 2020, said Shanel Boyce, who helped organize the event. As the protesters gathered, Ms. Boyce recalled, others showed up dressed in tactical gear and carrying guns, standing nearby to watch. “They shouted and spat at us, saying: ‘Go back to where you’re from,’” said Ms. Boyce, who is Black. “The racism here is commonplace.”
In other words, Broome County—which Jim Crow Joe Biden carried over Donald Trump in the 2020 elections—is typical of a sick and decaying capitalist society.
Racist Biden rides to liberal bosses’ rescue
The Big Fascists, the dominant finance capitalists of the U.S. ruling class, sent Biden to Buffalo two days after the massacre to proclaim that “white supremacy will never have the last word.”  But this is the same arch-racist who wrote the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that intensified racist attacks on Black and Latin workers, one of several Biden-sponsored laws that led to the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration (Vox, June 2020). As a new senator, he worked hand-in-hand with segregationist politicians like Mississippi’s James Eastland to attack school busing for integration. Biden’s latest budget proposal would hand out an additional $30 billion to shore up state and local police departments across the U.S. Here is the liberal bosses’ answer to mad dogs like Payton Gendron: attacks on Black and Latin workers will be controlled and organized by the state.
Taking his cue from Biden, Byron Brown, Buffalo’s Black mayor, is pushing to increase the budget for Buffalo’s cops, the same state terrorists who fractured a 75-year-old protestor’s skull in one of the mass demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd. Like Eric Adams, Lori Lightfoot, Ras Baraka, and a long train of Black mayors and police chiefs, Brown is a class traitor who serves and protects the interests of finance capital.
  These Big Fascist bosses, the ones who control the Democratic Party, are an even greater danger to our class than open racists like Trump or Tucker Carlson, or the gun-toting white nationalist militias that do their bidding. The Small Fascist Republicans have paralyzed Congress and seized the U.S. Supreme Court. They promote virulent sexism, racist vigilantism, and the “Great Replacement Theory,” the Nazi myth that spurred Gendron to shoot and kill as many Black workers as he could. But at least for now, the liberal Big Fascists still control the police and the military. They’re the ones leading the charge toward an inter-imperialist war with rivals China and Russia. They will stop at nothing to protect their global profits. Both Big Fascists and Small Fascists use racism to build fascism. They use electoral politics to offer themselves up as the solution for the danger of the other side.
The long-term strategy of the U.S. ruling class is to keep white workers’ allegiance with a few reform crumbs while turning their misery under capitalist life into anger against their Black and immigrant working-class sisters and brothers—to exploit, divide, and conquer. These bosses and their rotten system can be defeated only by a mass communist movement, a movement for workers’ power. We cannot smash racism and sexism until we put capitalism in its grave.
Multiracial fightback     
Buffalo has a long history of multiracial unity in the fight against racism, dating back to its days as the last stop before Canada on the Underground Railroad. By hosting the Niagara Movement in 1905, a conference organized by W.E.B. Du Bois and other anti-segregationists, Buffalo gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. The city has a proud history of militant class struggle that won significant gains for industrial workers. It was in Buffalo, in 1962, that the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) was founded by workers who refused to follow the old communist movement in its retreat into reformism. In 1965, PLM became Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which continues to fight for communist revolution and a society run by and for the international working class.
Nothing inspires fear in the ruling class like militant, multiracial, antiracist, and antisexist class struggle led by Black workers and youth. Their greatest fear is our greatest hope. In a period where outrageous assaults on our class are met with silence, our efforts to mobilize even modest workplace responses are significant (see letter, page 6).  Where outrage overflows into spontaneous action, we see our bold leadership and communist ideas embraced by workers and youth in motion. No matter the scale or intensity of the struggle, we seek to up the ante by injecting communist consciousness.  
In the face of escalating attacks, we cannot retreat into cynicism or the dead end of elections. As we fight racist and sexist assaults from Small Fascist forces like Gendron, we must join mass movements that the Big Fascists will be determined to control. But these liberal rulers are the same bosses who have segregated and choked to death the working class--from Buffalo to Brooklyn, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis. They have nothing to offer but more fascism and wider war. The millions they have watched die from Covid-19 worldwide pale in comparison to the numbers they’re planning to shepherd to slaughter in World War III.  
Communists must never again lead workers into the arms of the ruling class. The great replacement that workers of the world need is a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only when armed struggle has driven the capitalist class from power worldwide will we establish new conditions - communist social relations - where racist mass murder first becomes impossible and then a distant memory. If this is the world you want to see then the Progressive Labor Party is your political home.