Posted on

Police Murders Continue Non-Stop. We Must Demand Justice.

By Gabriel Mangano

The police murders of working class and oppressed people continues without end, rising to 277 by early April.

Especially targeted are African Americans who are 31% of police murder victims but 60% of unarmed victims. In Brooklyn, 4 police shot Saheed Vassel, a mentally ill Jamaican immigrant, 10 times within 10 seconds of confronting him. He was holding only a showerhead and was known as harmless and helpful to people throughout his neighborhood. Demonstrators demanded justice and condemned the lack of mental health services.

In late March, police in Sacramento, CA shot Stephon Clark, a 22-year old father of two, 8 times in the side and back in his grandmother’s back yard. He was holding a cell phone. Thousands demonstrated against this murder blocking freeways and forcing the cancellation of two NBA games. And in Louisiana, right-wing state Attorney General Jeff Landry refused to indict the cop who murdered Alton Sterling. Even after a video shows Officer Salamoni telling Mr. Sterling that he would murder him if he moved, he was not jailed, just fired.

As of yet none of these murderers have been indicted.

In California, state legislators proposed a law that would change when lethal force can be used to “only when necessary” from “when reasonable”. All this will change, however, is the language the police will use to justify their killings.
Since the murder of Trayvon Martin, millions of people have demanded justice for these police and vigilante killings. And many reforms have been proposed and put into practice. However, all of these reforms are doomed to failure. For example, civilian review boards have been highly touted as a way to control brutal “bad apples”. Yet after years of struggle, the Newark, New Jersey civilian review board was effectively broken by a judge’s injunction restricting its subpoena and investigatory powers. Body cameras are another minimal solution that has proven unworkable as police routinely turn them off. As well, district attorneys often fail to indict, and juries rarely convict those who are indicted despite overwhelming graphic evidence of what would clearly be murder for anyone but a cop.

These reforms and other false cures cannot succeed because they are based on the lie that the police are here to serve and protect everyone equally. The role of the police is to serve and protect the ruling class, the owners and their property. And they can only do this by reigning terror on working class and minority communities. The rich know they stole their wealth from our labor, and they will use every means to keep us down.

While the revolutionary workers know that these reforms, although they may save a few lives, will not solve the problem of police terror and that the murder of working class men and women will continue unabated, we still fight for these reforms. Only in this way can we expose the rottenness of the capitalist system and the murderous thugs who help protect it. Only the overthrow of capitalism can finally end this plague on working and oppressed people.

Black mothers and babies die at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies.

Criminal racism, cuts to healthcare are to blame.

Black Lives Matter

Posted on

Celebrating 300 Years of New Orleans History? Working People Have Nothing to Celebrate!

By Malcolm Suber

The residents of New Orleans are being battered by the omnipresence of New Orleans’ ruling class promoting this city’s tricentennial. For the white supremacist ruling class it has been 300 years of consolidating their rule by every scheme available. They have grown fat, rich and comfortable in their mansion sized homes and glittering office towers. Vacations in the summer. Good education for their kids. Eating at the famous restaurants . Attending a constant round of balls and business luncheons. Clearly the rich white ruling class of New Orleans has much to celebrate.

But what do we working people, especially the Black working class people of New Orleans, have to celebrate? Not much! Although the working class does all the work and are the creators of New Orleans food and culture, the ruling class almost exclusively benefits from the culture we produce. We are assigned to the bottom rungs of society. We struggle to keep a roof over our heads. The city which fleeces us with sales taxes, parking fees and red light cameras provides little for us. Rent and daycare are too high; police terror and incarceration are too frequent We have little time for ourselves or our families.
The ruling class is salivating about the extra tens of thousands of tourists that will come to New Orleans to celebrate the tricentennial. Profits are anticipated to grow by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ask yourself, will New Orleans workers be better off?

The tricentennial celebrations reinforce the complete mastery of the racist white ruling class which has ruled New Orleans since its founding. The ruling class waged war to remove the indigenous peoples from this land and imported kidnapped Africans to come to the colony to do the heavy work of felling the cypress trees and draining the swamps. The plantation owners and the apparatus created to perpetuate the chattel slave system accumulated great wealth from the unpaid labor of the enslaved Africans.

When New Orleans and Louisiana experimented with a multi-racial democracy based on legal equality for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the planter class organized the White League to overthrow the reconstruction government. The terrorist atrocities include the 1866 massacre of hundreds at the Mechanics Institute and the September 1874 coup against the Reconstruction government. This counter revolution ushered in the Jim Crow period and the virtual re-enslavement of Black freedmen and women into the share cropping system.

Black people and their allies struggled to maintain the gains of emancipation but were overwhelmed by the forces of reaction and white supremacy. The US government withdrew federal troops from the south who had been there to guarantee the political rights of the freedmen. The state of Louisiana adopted a white supremacist state constitution and passed all types of laws curtailing the rights of Black people; especially their right to vote.

When the Civil Rights and the freedom struggle of the Black nation reemerged in the 1950s, the white supremacist ruling fomented a mass racist movement to support racial discrimination and segregation. This forced separation was entirely in the interest of the ruling class to keep all workers in the South poorly paid and super exploited.

Posted on

In Honor of Black History Month: The Struggle Continues to Remove All Undemocratic Monuments & Symbols of Oppression

By Leon Waters

“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”

– V. I. LENIN, THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RENEGADE KAUTSKY

Following the counter-revolutionary overthrow of the Louisiana Black Reconstruction government and its white radical allies (1870-1890’s), the former oppressor class was brought back to power; to political power, which is state power. The restoration of the oppressor class, which could no longer maintain chattel slavery, could now, in alliance with the former Northern adversary, jointly move forward in rebuilding Louisiana with ‘free labor’ or ‘wage labor’. The former Northern ally, the Republican Party, with its growing millionaire industrial class, would now betray the newly freed African people and conciliate to the new form of political rule, or state rule: Jim Crow. With its vicious ideology of white supremacy, the erection and proliferation of white chauvinist, white supremacist monuments, statues, markers, tombstones, fleur de lis, and other racist symbols would rise. These symbols represent the restoration of white supremacy rule, or the white supremacist dictatorship of the rich over the laboring masses, especially the Black masses who suffer from a double burden of oppression.

Like the whole United States, New Orleans society is divided into classes: the class of the rich millionaires and billionaires and the class of the poor workers, unemployed and incarcerated. The rich live a fine luxury life by paying low wages, piecemeal wages, poverty wages or, in some cases, no wages to the thousands of laboring masses. In order to maintain their system of thievery, the rich exercise their rule through control of the state and control of the state machinery-an organ of force, an organ of coercive rule, unrestricted by any law. The Tom Bensons, Marriotts, Entergy, etc. call this form of rule ‘democracy’.

The media flunkeys of the rich, i.e., the Times Picayune, WDSU television, Essence magazine, and all the intellectual flunkeys of the rich, Harvard, Tulane, LSU, etc. insist that our ‘democracy’ is the greatest expression of liberty, equality and freedom in the world.
The struggle to establish the democracy of the people, for the people and by the people, socialism, is really a struggle to establish a democracy of the majority, a struggle that must be waged to defeat the sham democracy of the rich, the democracy of the numerical few. What would Genuine Democracy look like? Once the class of millionaires and billionaires has been overthrown, once their resistance has been crushed, and once the bureaucratic machine of bourgeois state power has been smashed, the laboring masses can then erect a new state machinery to govern society. This new state, this new form of rule that represents the rule of the laboring people, will begin to reorganize a new economy by seizing the means of production, (factories, docks, hotels,) and capital (banks, financial institutions) and transforming them into the public property of the state, and hence, the laboring masses. These steps will end the exploitation of the laboring masses because the rich will no longer have control and a new economy can be organized and planned based on the needs of the laboring masses. The masses can then be drawn into the administration of the whole new state, trained and educated in the management of their new state power.

The New Orleans City Council would cease to be a ‘talking body’ and actually become a ‘working body’ for the genuine benefit of the laboring masses.

Institutions, including the schools, legislative bodies, courts, jails, and all other governing bodies would be converted into institutions of the laboring masses that suppress the rule of the rich millionaires and billionaires and their lackeys. The laboring masses would, obviously, establish a new legal framework, a new constitution that outlaws exploitation, all forms of oppression, including all forms and symbols of white supremacy.

New monuments, statues, markers, etc. that reflect the victory of the formerly oppressed over the oppressors would be erected widely to replace the current shameful reactionary monuments and street names today. The fight for democracy, true democracy, real democracy for the majority is part of the fight to defeat the rule of the rich today. Let us learn the lessons from the past. When George Washington and company got rid of English domination in 1783, they rightly made a clean sweep of all symbols of British oppression. They knew that if such symbols remained, the hand of reaction would be strengthened and oppression would not be eliminated. They tore down all statues of King George. The same should be done today!

FOR GENUINE DEMOCRACY!

SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NATION!

DOWN WITH WHITE SUPREMACY!

Leon A. Waters is a well known Black history expert. Born and raised in New Orleans, he has been a shipyard worker, a steel worker, a chemical worker, a custodian, a postal worker, a textile worker, a delivery man and a salesman during his life.

Posted on

Oppose the Stepped Up FBI-Led War Against the Black Liberation Movement

By Malcolm Suber

The New Orleans Workers Group (NOWG) strongly opposes the August 2, FBI report that named so-called “black identity extremism” as a terrorist movement motivated by retaliation for incidents of police abuse and terrorism against African-Americans. The report predicts an increase in violence based on 6 attacks against police between 2014 and 2016, including Michael Johnson on July 7th, 2016 in Dallas where 5 cops were killed.

In all 6 incidents, a total of 8 police officers were killed, but this doesn’t compare to the hundreds of black people killed by cops according to the Washington Post. In 2015, police killed 259 black people. This move by the FBI to claim that black identity extremism is equivalent to white extremism and nazism is ridiculous on it’s face. We know that the racist white supremacist Donald Trump and the justice department under the leadership of Jeff Sessions are encouraging white supremacists and hell-bent on continuing the slaughter of black people in this country. The (BIE) designation is putting old wine in a new bottle. This is a continuation of the infamous COINTELPRO program created by J Edgar Hoover, designed to disrupt and derail the Black Liberation struggle.

The resurgence of the Black Liberation struggle, inspiring the Black Lives Matter movement, causes great consternation to the white racist billionaires who now run this country. They are hell-bent on preventing the resurgence of a strong black liberation struggle that may spark struggles among other oppressed peoples and segments of US society. NOWG calls for all of us to become more vigilant about infiltrators and agent provocateurs, which are trade tools of the FBI. Hopefully this latest program will not end with the murders and imprisonment of the newly developed leaders of the Black Liberation struggle.

We must all be vigilant and understand that the US state controlled by the billionaire ruling class is not neutral and has always been part of the lynch mob attitude towards the black masses and their struggle for freedom and liberation. We ask all working people and our allies to stand up and expose the fraudulent nature of the BIE designation. The real terrorists, the white supremacist neo-nazi elements of society who are trying to continue the terror campaign of the government and the Ku Klux Klan must be combatted and exposed as racist scum.

If all the oppressed and exploited stand together, we can turn back this assault by the FBI and the government and move closer to the day of the triumph of the workers revolution that will eliminate white supremacy and the billionaire ruling class.

Posted on

Celebrate Black August! Free all political prisoners!

By Malcolm Suber

August has been the month when the Black resistance to national oppression has been expressed most sharply going back to the days of enslavement.

August 2017 marks the 50-year anniversary of the widespread Black rebellions against racist national oppression in the USA. The Black masses came out into the streets of America to challenge state enforced segregation, poverty and police terror. Detroit, Newark and more than 180 cities and towns went up in flames representing the fire in the belly of the black masses for freedom and liberation. Unfortunately, conditions for the Black masses have not fundamentally changed since the 1960s. Poverty and police terror are still rampant.

The response of the US state to these righteous Black rebellions was the creation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO whose aim was to destroy the Black revolutionary leadership by murdering many leaders such as Fred Hampton and jailing many others. The ruling class feared that the Black rebellion would spread and allies would join the liberation struggle to overthrow the racist capitalist government. There are still dozens of political prisoners in the United States, many of whom have been incarcerated for more than 40 or 50 years. They have become elders inside prison- Black, Puerto Rican, Native, Chicano/Latino and white revolutionaries who have dedicated their lives to the freedom struggle.

The New Orleans Workers Group supports the commemoration of Black August as a time to recognize the life, work and struggles of these revolutionary fighters who have been held as political prisoners. The NOWG is composed of workers and the oppressed that consciously call for and organize toward ending the rule of the billionaire capitalist class. We see ourselves as part of the revolutionary heritage of resistance that harks back to the founding of this racist settler country. From the resistance of indigenous tribes against the settler-colonialists to the first flight to freedom by the enslaved African captives, there have been outstanding leaders and organizers who have fought for the freedom and liberation of the oppressed.

In 1979, revolutionary captives in the California prisons began to call on revolutionary supporters to commemorate Black August to focus on the fact that the US capitalist state had many political prisoners in its gulags. They called on supporters to begin the necessary work of exposing the capitalist state and working to free our heroes and sheroes from imprisonment.

Black August, as noted by one of our most famous political prisoners, Mumia Abu-Jamal, is “a month of divine meaning, of repression and radical resistance; of repression and righteous rebellion; and collective efforts to free the slaves and break the chains that bind us”.
The triggering event for contemporary Black August can be found in the actions of Jonathan Jackson who was gunned down at the Marin County courthouse on August 7, 1970 as he attempted to liberate three imprisoned Black liberation fighters: James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee (still imprisoned), the sole survivor of the August 7th rebellion.

George Jackson was assassinated on August 21, 1971, a deliberate move by the US state to eliminate his revolutionary leadership. Three prison guards were killed in the rebellion sparked by George’s assassination. The government charged six Black and Latino prisoners with the guards’ deaths. These six brothers became known as the San Quentin six and were later acquitted of all charges.

Black August is a time for revolutionaries to rededicate themselves to struggle and to study the revolutionary history of the Black Liberation Movement. A brief listing of Black struggles in August include:

• The arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, VA in August 1719

• The start of the Haitian revolution in August, 1791

• Gabriel’s rebellion of August 30, 1800 • Nat Turner’s rebellion August 21, 1831

• The Watts Rebellion of August 1965

• The Detroit rebellion August 1967

• The RNA 11 shootout with the FBI in Jackson, MS on August 18, 1971

• The bombing of MOVE by Philadelphia police August 8, 1978

Long live the spirit of Black August! Free all our political prisoners!