Letters of October 15

NYPD, KKK, How Many Workers Did You Kill Today?
“F—k your assimilation!  We want our liberation!”  On August 23 in New York, 4,000 people crowded into the Staten Island area where the cops of the One-Two-O Precinct strangled Eric Garner to death. The multiracial crowd slammed the cops, the in-justice system, and racism. The chants were exactly the opposite of liberal Sharpton’s/De Blasio’s/Obama’s absurd message of peace, calm, and surrender to racist killer cops. PLP was there with a flyer with a one-word heading: “Rebellion.”  Some PL’ers marched with their mass organizations and some took the opportunity to introduce chants in the more militant sections of the march such as “NYPD KKK, How many kids did you kill today?”  “How do you spell racist? NYPD.”  “How do you spell terrorist? NYPD.”
These chants come out of PLP’s immersion in recent years with the families of Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, and Kyam Livingston, victims of the NYPD’s reign of terror.
Eric Garner’s murder site was a quiet neighborhood of working-class homes and mom and pop stores, a place where you understood people were poor enough to need to buy cigarettes by the ones and twos, as Garner occasionally sold them. (Calling this illegal when the tobacco industry legally makes billions by killing people with lung cancer tells you much of what you need to know about the justice system.)
“We have our little economy here,” a resident marching with us explained, and the cops’ “broken windows” policy of attacking minor “crimes” is just a plain invasion, a provocative aggression to keep people in terror of the armed force of the state. That violence is a need of the capitalist state to prevent rebellion — but when they use murderous violence as in Staten Island or Ferguson, they also expose their racist intent and produce the very rebellion they hope to contain.
The job of communists is to lead this mood towards revolutionary insight into how capitalism oppresses us and how to free ourselves. The popular cry for “justice,” for example, comes straight from the heart of our grief and rage and seems natural and right; but it misses the fact that it is those who hold power who commit these racist crimes and they will not punish themselves for what they deliberately do: kill us indiscriminately especially if we are black and brown.
As communist thinking takes hold on this new generation of rebel workers, the true name of the class that oppresses and kills us will ring out loud and clear and the last thing we will want to do is make peace with it.
The fact of people’s desire for justice, a justice worthy of the name; the fact of their hatred of racism and their warmth as we marched, black and brown and white strangers, together; and the fact of their just rage, I — once again — have no doubt whatsoever that we in PLP and communists like us anywhere in the world always have the potential of organizing revolution.  Esta lucha va llegar/A la guerra popular.  This struggle will lead to a workers’ war. The seed of communist revolution is in these marchers’ hearts.  It correctly reflects their reality and their urge to change it. We must nurture that.
A Comrade
Change Will Come
The Howard University student government, through its Political and External Affairs Committee, organized a busload of 50 students to go to Ferguson during the Labor Day weekend. Participating with militant young demonstrators in the midst of a wrenching racist attack that still continues today led many of the Howard students to step up and continue the struggle. Several of the students received copies of CHALLENGE during the Labor Day march in Ferguson, learning for the first time about the need to fight for communism.
One of these students spoke at the annual PLP crabfeast, with dozens of transit workers and others present.  A few excerpts from her speech indicate the power that participating in sharp struggle can have.
“When I first saw the image of Mike Brown shot down on the ground, chills...ran through my body. “Here, we go again!”...the sad truth is in America what more can we expect. I never thought that I would end up in Ferguson, Missouri protesting...The magnitude of my efforts didn’t fully hit me until after I walked by the burnt-down QuikTrip gas station. In that moment, snapshots of the community in anger and rage clouded my head as if I was back in elementary school flipping through the pages of a Civil Rights history book in the library. It’s crazy to think  that all the things I’ve read in books, saw in photos, movies, and television about protests for peace and justice was actually unfolding right in front of my big, brown eyes of fury.
As I walked into the massive crowd of protesters holding signs, posters, and protest-inspired t-shirts, I felt overwhelmed with satisfaction that a change was going to come, a change is going to come, and our efforts today are only bridging the gap of justice and racial equality . . .  Looking back on my experience in Ferguson, Missouri, I can honestly say that it has been a humbling, life-changing, and monumental experience. I always knew I had a voice, but after this trip it has given me a purpose to no longer hold myself back and be a catalyst of change for the greater good ...”
A Fighter
Barbarism = U.S. Imperialism
Barbarism by definition is something others do but not the accusers
The beheadings by ISIS on video of two U.S. journalists have been called “barbaric” by U.S. officials.  While these vicious and murderous actions certainly were barbaric (savagely cruel, exceedingly brutal), one of the most difficult lessons for us to learn is not to take sides in situations where both sides are our enemies.  
The charge of “barbarism” usually refers, first, to something someone else does and, second, to something rare enough that it isn’t accepted as normal practice.  Beheadings haven’t been all that popular since the French Revolution of the late 1700s.  At that time they were not widely regarded as barbaric.  Today, grisly murders by many means, committed by capitalist ruling classes and their minions, have become so commonplace that we are often blinded to the fact that their essence, if not their appearance, is barbarism.  
To take just a few modern examples, what must we call the recent murder of black teenager Mike Brown, who had his hands up, in Ferguson, Missouri, by the cop Darren Wilson?  What about the more than 400 similar murders of young men, almost entirely black or Latin, by U.S. cops every year – more than one a day?  
What about the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian shelling deaths of several hundred to one?  And again, refusing to take sides between two groups who are both our enemies, Hamas is just as guilty as the Israeli government and its U.S. backers.  
What about the massive bulldozing of tons of dirt by juggernaut U.S. military machines to bury hundreds of fleeing Iraqi soldiers during Gulf War I in 1991?  Or the simultaneous shootings by U.S. troops of soldiers trying to flee or surrender, gleefully called a “turkey shoot” by one racist soldier?  Was this not barbaric as well?
What about the sanctions against Iraq by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton that prevented medicines and foods from reaching the Iraqi working class for years, and that reportedly killed a million and a half civilians, half a million of whom were children?  And what about Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s terming these deaths “a price we’re willing to pay”?  Is the wanton murder of a million and a half people somehow less barbaric than the beheadings of two, based on the racist premise that Iraqi lives are worth less than U.S. lives?
When the Nazis freely practiced collective punishment during World War II, murdering entire villages as a reprisal for the assassination of a Nazi officer, it was called “barbaric” by U.S. media. But the same collective punishment is called “justified” when practiced by the U.S. military.
For a few centuries, barbarism characterized the entire exploitative, profit-making, colonial relationship between the U.S. and European countries and various conquered peoples.  Barbarism at the hands of the world’s capitalists is the condition of the world today. It will remain so until the world’s working class turn to their communist leadership in PLP and throw the barbaric capitalists and their entire barbaric system into the sea with triumphant finality.
Saguaro Rojo
U.S. Humanitarian Hypocrisy
The CHALLENGE issue of 09/17/14 was particularly good; most interesting were the articles on police killings of citizens and the article of the SWAT team breaking and entry.  The United States for some time as been a police state; a place of violence and terror, and unfortunately is forced on the whole world.  Life for so many people around the world is one of misery, exploitation and depravation because of U.S. policies.
I have come to think that the U.S. has been and is involved in any internal conflict wherever it happens.  They foment and arm, sometimes, all sides to create a very unstable and unsafe environment.  As I read the United Nations reasons for why ISIS must be controlled, my thought was the reasons completely described the actions of the U.S. in so many countries.  I believe U.S. imperialist policies of violence and military force around the world results in groups fighting back to survive and more violence.  And now the military is being sent to Africa to combat Ebola; is this different than the military sent to occupy Haiti after the hurricane?
A Friend
UN and Celebrities Blowing Hot Air
That was the consensus of a group of seniors, some over 80, who had walked the entire route of the New York City People’s Climate March of over 400,000. The seniors were voicing their opinion of the September 24 United Nations summit on the environment which was addressed by Presidents, Prime Ministers, national delegates and even  movie stars who, collectively, once again claimed progress in preventing climate disasters that have continued to wreck havoc on the world’s people.
“All those speeches are just blowing hot air into global warming” they said. Instead of announcing if anything was being done to stop the massive corporate exploration for fossil fuels and government subsidies to the fracking and pipeline industries, which is like bringing cigarettes into a cancer ward, the UN gives us a movie star like Leonardo DiCaprio. He told the UN, “I pretend for a living, but you do not,” implying that delegates could really act to reverse climate change. What a sellout! It’s as if the UN delegates are not the biggest actors for capitalist oil and gas interests whose profit priorities are destroying the earth.
I noticed many signs at the March saying the system must change and signs that said capitalism was that system. I added that only worldwide revolution can eliminate capitalist bosses and their pollution, wars, unemployment and poverty. Only this will save the earth and the people who depend on it.
Senior Comrade