Under capitalism, it is no crime to shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times as he tries to run for his life. That was the law laid down by a grand jury in Akron, Ohio, which refused to charge the eight kkkops who assassinated 25-year-old Jayland Walker last June. It was one more outrageous example of how deadly capitalism is for Black workers, and for young Black men and youths most of all. The capitalist bosses use their criminal injustice system to defend racist murder because it serves their interests to divide and terrorize the working class. Only when the working class takes power through communist revolution will all workers have a future to live for.
After chasing Jayland Walker for the capital offense of a broken taillight, the cops in Akron cornered him on foot in a parking lot and gunned him down with nearly one hundred bullets. The grand jury’s despicable failure to hold these murderers accountable exposed how young Black workers are blamed for their own assassinations at the hands of the state.
Racist terror epidemic
After mass uprisings in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, many workers desperately hoped that capitalism could be reformed to the point where Living While Black would no longer be a crime. But Jayland’s killing proves once again that as long as we allow the profit system to exist, the capitalist rulers will keep siccing their racist mad dogs on Black and Latin and immigrant workers. Once the bosses diverted the reform movement to defund the police into the election campaign for Jim Crow Joe Biden, the liberal politicians flipped, as usual, to serve their capitalist masters. Despite the fact that the U.S. murder rate fell last year and remains far below what it was in the 1980s and ‘90s (USA Today, 1/26), the bosses are using a trumped-up “crime wave” to pour more money into police terror and put more cops on the streets.
The results? In 2022, at least 1,176 workers and youth—a record high--were slaughtered by the cops. Fewer than a third of these killings involved even an alleged violent crime. The lynching of Jayland Walker was no aberration. Nearly one hundred murders-by-cop involved traffic violations; nearly four hundred involved people fleeing—workers mostly shot in the back. And 24 percent of these victims were Black workers and youth, nearly double their proportion in the general population. Over the last ten years, Black residents were three times more likely to be killed by cops than white residents. In Chicago, the rate was 25 times higher; in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, 28 times higher (The Guardian, 1/6).
Capitalism can’t exist without racism
The capitalist ruling class needs the racism that empowers cops to criminalize, dehumanize, and murder Black workers. They count on the terror that these armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries unleash on the most exploited sections of the working class. For hundreds of years, the U.S. bosses have reaped obscene profits from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers and from the wage slavery in their factories and fields. Today, as capitalism worldwide spirals into crisis, hard-won gains by the working class – led by Black workers and the communist movement – are quickly disappearing. While low wages and a lack of affordable housing or decent health care are scourges that plague the entire working class, they fall hardest on those targeted by capitalist racism and sexism. The median wage of Black workers is 20 percent lower than that of white workers (lending tree.com, 2/7). For Black women, the difference is 46 percent (AAUW.com). The official unemployment rate for Black workers is 60 precent higher than for white workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4/7).
To justify their system’s terror and racist inequalities, the capitalists trot out their tired old lies about Black workers, and particularly about young Black men. The bosses’ more openly racist faction, now fronted by the Republican Party, explicitly courts the allegiance of the likes of Andrew Lester, the racist vigilante in Kansas City who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl for ringing the wrong doorbell. But the liberal Democrats are also eager to convince workers to fear and scapegoat one another and to rely on the bosses for protection. Black mayors like Eric Adams in New York and Karen Bass in Los Angeles are leading the push to put more killer cops on the streets (LA Times, 4/18).
These misleaders and apologists are appealing to workers made cynical by the chronic failures of capitalism. Their job is to deceive our class into trusting that the problems in their neighborhoods—drug abuse, homelessness, gang violence—can be solved by the very same capitalists who created those problems in the first place.
Profits, war, and fightback
Workers in Akron and Kansas City are right to be taking to the streets, marching shoulder to shoulder, demanding change. They are joining a wave of working-class anger simmering across the globe. From France and Britain to Canada and South Korea, workers are rising up and fighting back. Miitant protesters against Amazon and Adidas are calling out the billionaires who exploit our class from Seattle to Southeast Asia. Though the working class is not yet organized, not yet confident in its own enormous power, many are seeing that capitalism is an abject failure. The more we unite with each other to confront the bosses, the more confidence we build in our class.
At the same time, we must understand that capitalism cannot be fixed or reformed to serve workers’ needs. As a system driven by maximum profit, it must constantly lower labor costs. But as the working class becomes more impoverished, we cannot buy what the bosses need to sell. This basic contradiction fuels the inter-imperialist competition for resources and markets that will inevitably lead to the next global war. As the capitalists gear up for that conflict, they will need workers’ allegiance more than ever. As their crisis deepens, they will be forced to drop the mask of liberal democracy in favor of open fascist terror. The racist violence the bosses are now directing at Black workers is a reminder of what lies in store for all of us. The capitalists will stop at nothing to try to save their rotten system.
The bosses’ greatest fear is that the working class—armed with multiracial unity and the bold leadership of Black workers within a communist party—will transform the reform struggle against racism into a fight for communist revolution. The hard fact is that the working class has no need for capitalism or its bosses. Even if Jayland Walker’s killers had been indicted, like the murderers who killed George Floyd, we would all too soon be mourning another lost brother or sister. Under capitalism, the bosses need cops to keep them in power and sustain their profit system. Under communism, the working class will organize society to enable us to look out for one another. With no ruling-class parasites to protect, no exploitation to enforce, we’ll have no need for cops. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party! Power to the working class!