The billionaire ruling class and its bought-and-paid-for politicians, newspaper editorial writers, and TV talking heads are in a tizzy about the possibility that Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, could win the Democratic party presidential nomination. They ask: haven’t our scare tactics and fairy tales worked? Have we produced a century of anti-socialist propaganda in vain? Haven’t workers and youth absorbed our basic teaching that capitalism = good; socialism = bad?
Never mind that the rich U.S. ruling class, with its much hyped “freedom of speech,” has done everything in its power to suppress dissent among the working class and oppressed. The billionaires’ control over public education give them years to hammer into our heads that the “free enterprise system” is preferable to “collective ownership.”
The purpose of red-baiting is to prevent the working class and the oppressed from discovering their own history of struggle to achieve checks on the rapacious greed and disregard for human life by the capitalist class. The 8-hour day, the elimination of child labor; the right to have unions, sick pay and paid vacation time, as well as the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid are all progressive reforms wrested from the ruling class through working class struggle.
The U.S. ruling class downplays the revolutionary, violent struggle that led to the founding of this country. “Revolution” is treated as an historical event that was perhaps good and necessary in the 18th century but dangerous today.
Don’t be fooled: to end the rule of the capitalist class, revolution is certainly needed today. Our task is to organize the workers through teaching and defending our revolutionary history as an inspiration and guide to our struggle today.
The billionaire ruling class and its flunkies in the bourgeois state are dismayed at the popular interest in socialism, no matter what brand. A majority of workers and youth are beginning to realize that capitalism holds no hope for the future. This terrifies the billionaires because in a socialist society they would be forced to give up some of their ill-gotten gains. Just about everyone except for billionaires accepts that they should not be allowed to dodge all taxes and shuffle their stolen wealth among off-shore bank accounts.
Both capitalist political parties, Democrats and Republicans are the willing tools of the ruling class and allow the rich to control the US government. Most of the laws proposed by Congresspeople and Senators are actually written by the paid lobbyists of the rich. The capitalists ply “our” representatives with bribes, convincing them that they too can enjoy the leisurely life of the rich if only they pledge to be sponsors for the lucrative government contracts that are awarded to their companies.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) leadership is panicking because their rigged primary system is actually proving an avenue for more people to examine Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Socialism. They are trying to force a Biden v. Sanders showdown where Biden will champion the line that socialism is an unwinnable with the USA electorate. We believe that workers will choose socialism, the only system that promises improved living and working conditions for the masses of people ground down by the current capitalist regime.
We are duty-bound to beat back the vicious red-baiting unleashed by the ruling class. Let us have discussions about the kind of society that best advances the living conditions of the working class.
At the same time, we must distinguish reform and revolution. Reform leaves in place the private ownership of the main means of production such as factories, mines, utilities, banks, etc. Revolution calls for the rule of the working class under which the property of the rich will become the property of the working majority, democratically run and administered to meet the needs of the working class.
We must fight to counter the confusion and deceptions advanced by the capitalists and all their propaganda outlets. We must make the case for revolutionary socialism.
The United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Malcolm Suber
For more than two decades, the U.S. public has been treated to annual MLK marches that repeat the mantra from the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King pronounced his dream that the U.S. would be a country where one day his four little children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The racist white ruling class annually cites this vague dream as a measure of the progress that Black people have made in this country. This has prevented us from evaluating the entire scope of continued Black oppression in the U.S.
Dr. King kept moving and organizing after the March on Washington. His vision also began to grow beyond the fight for civil rights for the oppressed Black nation. By 1967, Dr. King had studied national liberation movements around the globe and had concluded that his duty went beyond the fight to reform racist U.S. domestic policies. Perhaps the best example of his growing consciousness was his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered at the Riverside Church in New York City. This is a speech that the ruling class does not want you to hear and study.
By 1967 the war in Vietnam was gaining the attention of everyone, and millions of anti-war protesters hit the streets demanding an end to U.S. carnage of the Vietnamese, who were trying to gain national independence for their homeland. These mass marches were inspired by the civil rights struggle.
In 1967 the war was at its peak, with about 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. The U.S. would drop more bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than were dropped in all of Europe during WWII. This objective situation forced
Dr. King to conclude that the U.S. was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
King saw the U.S. war on Vietnam as an enemy of the poor.
The ruling class and its press condemned King for speaking out against the war, threatening to cut off funding for the civil rights struggle. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality meant exposing how the military-industrial complex had become an essential part of capitalist exploitation. King saw the war as an enemy of the poor. He saw the army using poor Black and white young men as cannon fodder to pursue the aims of U.S. imperialism. King said Vietnam was an unjust war meant to continue the domination of Western capitalist governments over colonial peoples.
King’s stance on the Vietnam war applies to U.S. imperialism’s present policy of forever war spread across multiple countries from its more than 800 military bases around the world. The ruling class formula for its forever war doctrine comes directly from lessons it learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass bombings; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of images of mangled bodies returning from the battlefronts; and unquestioning reverence for the military.
The Pentagon-sponsored mantras of “thank you for your service” and “support our troops” go hand in hand with the ruling-class attempts to prevent the revival of a mass anti-war movement. This movement would demand cutting the military budget as well. King would join us today and urge us to rebuild the anti-imperialist, anti-war movement.
We ask that you honor Dr. King by joining our freedom struggle to end the rule of the capitalist class and to close all U.S. bases around the world.
What is the American public to make of the impeachment inquiry taking place in Washington, DC? Daily we are tantalized with the prospect of some government “whistleblower” finally producing the “smoking gun” that will nail the criminal Donald Trump. The Democrats promise eventual evidence of Trump’s “high crimes and misdemeanors,” never mind the criminal U.S. wars that have seen 44,000 U.S. bombs dropped in the first year of Trump’s presidency. The Democratic Party leaders and their backers know that the Republican majority US Senate will not vote to remove Trump from office. Instead Trump is being given the opportunity to pose as the victim of the Democrats who failed to nail him during the Russiagate investigation. To his base of true believers, Trump is fighting the Washington establishment who seek to undermine his plans to put “America First” on the world stage.
The U.S. working class has more pressing problems than Trump’s crooked attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating his rival crook Joe Biden. We should follow the lead of the workers and oppressed in Puerto Rico, Chile, Sudan, Honduras and Haiti. They have all taken to the streets to demand the resignation of their corrupt bourgeois governments. Millions of Puerto Ricans took to the streets to demand #RickyRenuncia and a change in government followed. Millions in the U.S. can do the same by demanding #TrumpResign.
The U.S. imperialist ruling class regime requires endless war abroad and intensified state repression at home, both of which are rooted in white supremacy and the arousal of hatred for non-whites. Democrats are carrying out an impeachment inquiry that casts doubt on Trump’s loyalty to their program of war mongering. This lets the Democrats tout their pro-war and anti-Trump credentials, all while skirting the real problems of income inequality and cuts to social programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Just like Russiagate, Pelosi and the rest of the war-loving Democrat leadership have united to condemn Trump for pressuring a foreign power to interfere in the so-called “democratic” U.S. electoral process while the suppression of working class and oppressed voters continues to rise across the country.
Millions of Puerto Ricans took to the streets to demand #RickyRenuncia and a change in government followed. Millions in the U.S. can do the same by demanding #TrumpResign.
To support this impeachment inquiry is to suspend our knowledge that the U.S. is a sworn enemy of both Ukrainian workers and domestic whistleblowers.
The Nazi-loving regime in Ukraine receives direct U.S. government support. Recorded phone conversations between U.S. State Dept officials reveal that the top U.S. ambassador to Europe Victoria Nuland actively promoted the violent opposition forces which took power in the 2014 coup that toppled the Ukrainian government. The Obama/Biden government helped turn Ukraine into a failed state beholden to international finance capital and the rule of Nazi hordes. At home, the Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than any other administration in US history.
The current probe into the quid pro quo call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the height of hypocrisy. The truth is Trump’s brazen bribery upsets the capitalist ruling class who would prefer that the oppressed masses not know how these gangsters operate. Both Republican and Democratic Administrations have used the State Department and the CIA to influence international politics to benefit their individual electoral positions. The imperialist U.S. government has staged coups, invasions and proxy wars abroad, all to secure a world safe for US investments in capitalist exploitation.
The current efforts to impeach Trump allow the US ruling class and its politicians in Washington, DC to ignore the needs of the working class and the poor. Guaranteeing a living wage, ending mass incarceration, jailing racist police, addressing the climate catastrophe, ending imperialist war and opposing capitalism are all off the agenda. By exposing their hypocrisy—much less their own dirty deeds—the Democrats have only improved Trump’s chances for re-election. Revolutionaries and forward-looking workers shouldn’t be put off course by this political theatre. We should focus on educating the working class that our only salvation is organizing class struggle for our own interests, not those of the U.S. imperialist ruling class whether they fall into the camp of Pelosi’s Democratic Party or Trump’s Republican Party.
The multi-national Louisiana working class finds itself in well-worn and familiar territory as we approach the October gubernatorial election. We are being asked to choose between three rich, conservative, anti-choice white men who are squabbling among their class to see who best represents the interests of the oil and gas millionaires who are the real puppet-masters that run this state.
Neither Ralph Abraham, Jon Bel Edwards or Eddie Rispone have a program that will serve to improve the living conditions of Louisiana workers. All three are pursuing the right-wing goals of more intense exploitation of the workers while promising even more tax cuts for the rich. Rispone and Abraham promise to be the most loyal suck-ups to white supremacist President Donald Trump. Their program boiled down and addressed to the white workers and the white middle class is “if you like Donald Trump, you will love me”.
Meanwhile, the gist of Jon Bel Edwards’ program which is addressed to the white Republican majority is “I have successfully maintained your priorities for four years, why not extend my stay.”
Nowhere are there any promises to move Louisiana from the bottom of the list of places to live and raise your family. New Census Bureau data released in September showed that nearly 1 in 5 Louisiana residents lives below the poverty line. We now have the third highest poverty rate in the U.S. after Mississippi and New Mexico. Nowhere is there a promise to move Louisiana off the list as the most incarcerated state where thousands of working people are held in gulags for minor infractions of the law. Nowhere are there promises to improve the education of our children. Nowhere is there a program to end air pollution from the oil and chemical companies. And nowhere is there a program to lessen the regressive tax burden on the working class, replacing it with progressive taxes on the property of the rich.
Louisiana workers will never get off the bottom until we begin to organize and fight for our class interests, rejecting the program of the capitalist rulers to divide us along race, gender, sexual preference and immigration status. What that requires is for us to realize that the two political parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—are parties controlled by the rich to protect the interests of the rich. We should be working to develop a mass workers party that promotes the interest of the working class in opposition to the program of the capitalists who are hellbent on keeping us from redistributing the wealth created by our labor, which they currently hoard for themselves.
We must engage our fellow workers in discussions about the deceptive role of the Democrats and Republicans whose campaigns lie, lie, lie, proclaiming they represent all classes. We as wage-slaves do not share the same problems as the bosses and rich capitalists. They want to maintain this system of privilege for the rich and forced misery for the working class. We must get clear that we are at war against the rich billionaires and their government. Workers must fight to put political power in the hands of the workers’ political representatives who have no interest in exploiting working people.
“Violence is as American as cherry pie.” These words were first spoken in 1967 by H. Rap Brown (now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), a Black revolutionary leader of the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A reporter had asked whether Brown would renounce calls for violent resistance to the oppression of Black people. He replied that the U.S. white ruling class has always embraced violence against those whom they want to control. They have no right to request from the oppressed that which they will not renounce for themselves.
The entire settler state created by European colonizers was founded on the violent taking of indigenous lands and the kidnapping and forced enslavement of Africans.
Throughout its history, the U.S. ruling class has been determined to wipe out indigenous peoples through genocide. Following the Civil War, to maintain the now-freed Black workforce as cheap, exploitable laborers, the ruling class imposed over 150 years of racist tyranny through Klan terror, public lynchings, and racist pogroms such as those in Rosewood, FL and Tulsa, OK. To this day, white supremacist terrorists serve as an auxiliary to police forces, from the FBI down to the local cops. The USA has created the world’s largest police and prison system, primarily to contain and control its Black, formerly enslaved population as well as other non- whites and poor people within its borders.
Despite all the posturing by Republican and Democratic party spokespeople, there is no admission of the violent nature of the U.S. state or criticism of the murderous history of white supremacist rule.
The U.S. has a 500-year history of using mass killings as way to enforce its will on other countries and peoples. The crocodile tears now being shed by the white supremacist ruling class over the mass shootings in Gilroy, CA, El Paso, TX and Dayton, OH are just a cover to hide this history. Despite all the posturing by Republican and Democratic party spokespeople, there is no admission of the violent nature of the U.S. state or criticism of the murderous history of white supremacist rule.
The ruling class media and leaders of the twin parties of capitalist rule have finally had to call the armed white nationalist right wing “terrorists.” These latest atrocities have even compelled white supremacist-in-chief Donald Trump to verbally condemn “racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” However, U.S. police forces from the FBI on down are reluctant to attack their auxiliary forces. That is not the enemy they joined the police force to subdue. Their racism forces them to identify with fascist elements.
The military budget consumes 60% of all U.S. tax dollars. These funds are transferred to the billionaire owners of Pentagon-contracted companies that comprise the Military Industrial Complex. Domestically, the white supremacist rulers allow the mass distribution of weapons to right-wing armed white supremacists as well as urban gangs. These urban gangs engage in fratricide that helps to create a lack of trust among the working class masses.
The U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer. It forces its junior partners to purchase its weapons and disperses millions of weapons and ammunition to right-wing governments and reactionary fascist movements all over the world. As a result, from Venezuela to Yemen, thousands of innocent people die daily.
The intent of the U.S. ruling class is to keep the multi-national working class divided. Our task as class-conscious freedom fighters is to uproot these white supremacist poisonous weeds that have been and are presently being sown by the U.S. ruling class. We must overcome their efforts to divide us and unite to overthrow the capitalists and their state.
63% of City Budget goes to cops and jails, only 3% to children and families.
By Malcolm Suber
New Orleans mayor Latoya Cantrell and arch-racist DA Leon Cannizzaro have teamed up to announce yet another scheme to supposedly curb an uptick in crimes committed by youth, especially young Black men. They are using sensational reports of youth crimes to call for more funds for the NOPD, more police patrols and more police contact with our youth (meaning more unwarranted stops and searches).They are also calling for stepped up enforcement of the citywide youth curfew.
The mayor and DA paint a picture of Black youth as predators in need of rounding up and locking away from the majority of law-abiding residents; so they call for an expansion of the juvenile lock-up as well as the trying of more juveniles as adults.
We workers should not be taken in by this ruling class propaganda. Youth crime is tied to the lack of gainful employment opportunities and lack of recreational and cultural programs that provide youth with positive things to do in their non-school hours. Why don’t the Mayor and DA address the root cause of juvenile crime instead of offering a band-aid on the cancerous conditions which exist for New Orleans youth? The working class community is rightly frustrated by the almost nightly barrage of reported criminal activity by alienated youth. But the Mayor and DA are only playing to this frustration in order to get the public to consent to their plan to lock up more youth. These youth in many cases are lashing out against the rich white ruling class and their politicians who have written them off as nothing more than a public nuisance.
Where is the money for more programming at our recreational centers? Where is the money for hiring full-time coaches? Where is the money for counselors and for youth employment? Rather than ‘disrupting’ the pipeline to prison, the Mayor and DA are actually facilitating the mass incarceration of our youth. They would rather spend more money on surveillance cameras and give fat contracts to their friends to monitor ankle bracelets on the growing number of youth arrested by the NOPD.
“What we are seeing and the rhetoric we are hearing from the political elites is because the system continues to fail our communities. We do a great job of holding vulnerable youth and parents accountable, but who will hold the system accountable? WE WILL THAT’S WHO!”
— Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC)
Even though the capitalist media claims the USA economy is robust and nearing full employment, Black youth unemployment is nearly 50%. Many of their parents and guardians are forced to work two jobs and the youth are left to raise themselves. By allowing these conditions to fester, we show that we are not really concerned about saving these youth from the path to enslavement in the USA prison system.
Our task is to help our youth build a movement that champions their demands for a quality of life that gives them the freedom to explore their revolutionary history of struggle for Black liberation. This movement will train our youth to avoid the modern day slave catchers and give real meaning to being woke and the understanding that Black Lives Do Matter.
Revolutionary war is fought at the Battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres, Haiti, 1802. Haitians declared victory on January 1, 1804
By Malcolm Suber
2019 marks the 400th anniversary of the introduction of captured Africans as exploited laborers on present day US soil. For the Black masses it has meant 400 years of vicious white supremacist rule. 400 years of oppression and discrimination. 400 years of exploitation as unpaid and under-paid labor. 400 years of last hired and first fired. 400 years of rape, lynching and police murder. 400 years of denial of the right to self-determination.
Those captured Africans of 1619 on the slave-ship Jesus were sold into indentured service in the Jamestown colony in Virginia. The white ruling class farm owners soon saw an advantage in making the 7-year indenture for the Africans a permanent feature of their capture. The captured Africans were of a different culture and skin color of the European settlers and could be easily isolated. That transition of the captured Africans from indentured servant to chattel slavery almost permanently stained the relationship between Black and white workers.
The large landowners had to create a justification for holding other human beings into permanent chattel slavery. Their ideological champions invented the anti-human concept of white supremacy. The basic proposition was that the Africans and other non-Europeans were a sub-species of the human tree and that Europeans had a God-given right to civilize and make the “inferior” African into a useful being. White supremacy thus became the great divide that allowed for the importation of millions of captured Africans into the new world and the genocide of the indigenous nations who lived in the Americas.
“Harriet” by Elizabeth Catlett, 1975.
Oppression breeds resistance
Those captured Africans, of course, were not robots. They understood both freedom and captivity. Those most conscious fought to the death on the African continent, during the middle passage, and upon arrival in the Americas to regain their freedom and reassert their humanity.
The Africans escaped their masters and created maroon colonies. On the plantations and in the mountains and swamps surrounding the plantations they also organized slave revolts, the most successful of which was the revolution in Haiti in 1791.
Black Union Soldiers at Port Hudson, Louisiana, 1863.
The civil war
Throughout the decades of enslavement brave fighters came forward to combat the slave masters and fight to end chattel slavery. Gabriel Prosser, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner organized major slave revolts. Hundreds of others built settlements in the swamps and dared the slave catchers to come for them.
When the Civil War broke out, nearly 200,000 Black men took up arms in the Union Army to fight to end chattel slavery. These soldiers were primarily field hands who had been biting at the bit to strike a blow for freedom.
During Reconstruction, Black former slaves, many of them field hands, became representatives of their people on all levels of government from US Senators to local government, championing radical reconstruction, equal rights and the upliftment of the freed people as they transitioned from chattel to wage workers.
The attempts of the freed people to implement their democratic changes were overthrown in 1876 when the Hayes-Tilden compromise allowed the plantation owners to return to political power. The Black laboring people were driven back into virtual slavery through newly created peonage laws and the development of the sharecropping system. Democracy was replaced with the Jim Crow system of racial apartheid that existed in the southern states until the modern civil rights movement.
The possibility that democracy could be established in the Confederate states was defeated when the rapidly developing capitalist regime in the north decided to abandon the battle to establish and defend democratic rights of the freed people. The Black nation in the Black Belt South, instead of developing along bourgeois lines with the right to develop its national economy, became an oppressed nation subject to state oppression meted out by the former plantation owners who now held state power all over the south.
The struggle against Jim Crow segregation and the reign of terror unleashed to roll back all the gains of Reconstruction consumed the efforts of the Black struggle for freedom. The Black bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders struggled over the best approach to win equal rights for the Black masses. Two contending trends developed. One view of accommodation to the apartheid conditions was advanced by Booker T. Washington, who argued that Black people should develop a strong economy and the white ruling class would eventually extend equal rights to the Black masses. The other view, represented by W.E. B. DuBois, was that Blacks should never abandon the fight for equal rights and should press the federal government to guarantee equal treatment for Blacks. Both views advanced the notion that the Black bourgeois class should lead the Black liberation struggle.
Black women workers at El Segundo Aircraft Plant in Long Beach, CA during World War II
The Black proletariat strengthens
World War I caused the biggest internal shift and fissure in the Black liberation movement. Thousands of black soldiers were exposed to the war propaganda about fighting for freedom and democracy. This caused them to look at the conditions of the Black masses as a whole and to embrace radical trends developing in the world, especially the earth-shattering victory of the Russian Revolution. Additionally, many Blacks began the great migration to the north and west to take advantage of work in the factories. The Black working class began to see itself as exploited proletarians and part of the world struggle against capitalism. The first Black communist cadre were developed around the African Blood Brotherhood under the leadership of Cyril Briggs. The ABB called for the right to self-determination for the oppressed Black nation and the leadership of the Black working class.
World War II reinforced trends begun during WWI. During WWII there was a need for labor in the factories producing war materials. Black workers were needed in the factories. Millions abandoned the plantations of the South and landed in cities across the country. More Black soldiers fought overseas and came back ready to fight for full and equal citizenship rights. That period saw the growth of the Communist Party USA and the enrollment of thousands of Black workers. There began an effort to organize Black share croppers in the South. The CPUSA also gained wide support by their building support for the Scotsboro Boys, who had been falsely accused of rape. There was an open fight between the CPUSA, which championed the leadership of the Black workers, versus the NAACP forces, who championed the leadership of the Black bourgeois class.
The white supremacist capitalist ruling class promoted the leadership of the Black bourgeois and church leaders. The rulers would rather see a comprador class willing to accept capitalist society rather than a mass base for socialist revolution among Black workers.
By the early 1950s, the Black masses had rallied to the cause of ending racist discrimination and fighting for equal rights. The murder of Emmett Till; the victory against segregation in the Brown decision; and the Montgomery Bus Boycott served as catalysts for the Black liberation movement. This coupled with the awakening of the anti-colonial struggles of people of color worldwide. By 1960 Black student leaders came to the fore with militant actions to force an end to discrimination. Much of the leadership in this phase were church leaders and college students. The Black working class had yet to develop its own voice.
Election Night, Lowndes County, AL, 1966
By 1963 a more impatient mood had developed among the Black masses. Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders developed the March on Washington demanding equal rights and an end to discrimination. In the inner city ghettos, the voice and program of the Black nationalist and Black Muslim leader Malcolm X began to challenge the integrationist, non-violent civil rights leadership. Black rebellions broke out in city after city from 1963 -1970. The Black Panther Party exploded onto the scene, calling for revolution, and held the loyalty of the militant Black youth. The BPP became the target of US government suppression which led to the destruction of the BPP as a revolutionary force by 1970.
Black workers lead
This period also saw the awakening of the Black workers as a distinct voice for Black workers with an anti-capitalist program. In Detroit and rapidly in factories all over the USA, Black workers launched Black caucuses and revolutionary union movement which challenged the capitalist factory owners and the racist union leadership. Hundreds of wildcat strikes were staged. The most conscious elements began studying Marxism and embraced the anti-revisionist communist movement. This movement held that the CPUSA had abandoned the revolutionary road and it was time to build a new communist party under revolutionary leadership. The slogan became “Black workers take the lead”. This spoke to the conclusion that only the Black working class had the interest of completely ending national oppression by the overthrow of capitalism.
This Black working class challenge to Black capitalist leadership came in a period where the US state declared war on the revolutionary movement by jailing some of its best fighters and by introducing crack cocaine in the inner city. The ruling class promoted the leadership of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Black Democratic Party elected officials.
400 years of struggle has shown that the complete liberation of the Black masses will only come about with the destruction of the racist capitalist state. The only class capable of promoting and working for this program is the Black working class. This will happen only if the class-conscious Black worker and communist organizations make organizing and developing the class struggle of Black workers the center of our revolutionary work.
The Chrysler wildcat strike begins in Detroit, MI, 1968 led by the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) an organization of Black revolutionary workers.
“The BPP members made sacrifices for our collective liberation that can never be repaid short of the overthrowing the capitalist ruling class and ushering in the rule of the working class.”
The year 1968 was a high point of the Black Liberation struggle in the USA. The oppressed Black masses had decidedly turned away from the non-violent, assimilationist civil rights movement. The passage of the civil rights bill in 1964 and the voting rights bill of 1965 had to some extent marked the end of civil rights demands. The Black masses were seeking an end to government and extra-governmental oppression characterized by constant police terror. They also wanted better living and working conditions and a brighter future for their children. Especially in the northern, mid-western and west coast ghettos the Black masses were seeking a new vision of what genuine liberation would look like. Desegregation would not satisfy their thirst for genuine freedom and self-determination.
The Black Liberation Movement (BLM) in the early 1960s had been about organizing and mobilizing the masses of Black people and their allies to demand political and social equality for Black people, especially in the apartheid-like conditions of the South. The 1960’s were also the era of the anti-imperialist national liberation movements by the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Countless people were moved to become part of this worldwide fightback. Many of them embraced the clarion call for revolution!
By 1963, the Black masses in the ghettos of US cities began to explode in righteous indignation to the wretched conditions that existed in their neighborhoods. They began to see clearly that the white capitalist ruled USA was not going to own up to its racism and discrimination and voluntarily change these conditions. It would take the resistance of the Black people themselves to force the ruling class to improve their conditions.
The civil rights leaders of the NAACP, the SCLC and CORE had rallied people around the slogan- “free by 63”. They told the masses that it was possible that the formal political and social equality of Black people could be accomplished by 1963, the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This was part of the energy that produced the August 1963 March on Washington.
Stepping into the political landscape of the early 1960s were the Black Muslims whose chief spokesman, Malcolm X, challenged the civil rights movement as being too assimilationist and not having tactics that would mobilize the Black working-class masses in the ghettos of America. Malcolm X and other Black nationalists lambasted “non-violence” as a brake on the BLM and instead advocated identifying with national liberation movements that were taking up armed struggle for their freedom.
By 1965 “Black Power” had eclipsed “we shall overcome” as the slogan that captivated the imagination of revolutionary minded freedom fighters.
Stepping into this rapidly developing BLM, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded by Bobby Seal and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, CA in October 1966. They began a campaign of arming themselves and monitoring police activity. They relied on California laws that allowed open carry of weapons. They openly confronted police who were brutalizing Black residents. They modeled themselves after the armed self-defense of Black communities in the South that had been led by Robert Williams in North Carolina and the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana.
The BPP became a fixture in everyone’s consciousness after they marched into the California state capitol bearing arms in 1967. This action shocked the white capitalist government and brought pride to the oppressed Black masses. Finally, an organization was emerging that would stand up to capitalist Amerikkka and organize the Black masses for revolution.
The BPP grew rapidly and had chapters all across the USA. They openly declared themselves to be revolutionary nationalists and elaborated their aims in the famous 10-point program. The BPP characterized itself as an armed propaganda unit spreading revolution in the USA. They took an anti-imperialist stance in support of the national liberation struggles, especially in support of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.
The BPP created a weekly newspaper that was widely circulated all over the USA. The BPP paper captured the mood of the Black masses. Of special universal interest were the powerful cartoons drawn by Emery Douglas that graphically portrayed the fight for liberation and the oppression of the pigs (the police).
The BPP grew swiftly and soon attracted the ire of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover declared the BPP as the greatest threat to domestic tranquility. All police forces, from the federal to the local level were ordered to harass and eliminate the BPP. Many BPP members were assassinated and many others arrested.
Government repression and the heavy infiltration of agent provocateurs ultimately caused the demise of the BPP as chapters pursued their own agenda. Whatever the shortcomings of the BPP, it was founded as a revolutionary organization and inspired the BLM. The BPP members made sacrifices for our collective liberation that can never be repaid short of overthrowing the capitalist ruling class and ushering in the rule of the working class.
A young survivor of the August 9, 2018 US/Saudi bombing of a school bus, with fragment of U.S. made missile. Photo by Yemeni photographer Ahmad Algohbarya.
By Malcolm Suber
Although most of our readers have very little information about the war in Yemen, we believe it necessary to give a working class perspective on one of the most devastating wars occurring in the world today. The U.S. capitalist press hardly mentions this war. The reason for the lack of coverage is that the U.S. imperialist ruling class bears real responsibility for the crisis. A quote from a Yemeni doctor sums it up this way: “The missiles that kill us – American made. The planes that kill us – American made. The tanks… American-made. You are saying to me where is America? America is the whole thing.” (From a PBS report by Jane Ferguson)
The Yemeni civil war pits Iran-backed Houthi rebels against the fascist Saudi Arabia-backed government forces who receive their weaponry and military advice from the U.S. pentagon.
Leaving aside the complex question of who is right in the conflict, there is no question that masses of innocent civilians have wrongly become targets. Hospitals, schools, mosques and other non-military targets have been hit. The Saudi led forces have dropped cluster bombs on Houthi sites.
The humanitarian disaster in Yemen is unthinkable. The UN puts the number of displaced at over 2 million, with 22 million Yemenis in danger of a cholera outbreak and starvation because of disruption of international aid shipments. Yet the civil war in Yemen has received very little attention in the US bourgeois press because it does not fit in their hierarchy of important news.
For one thing, Yemenis are poor, non-white people from a distant third world country. Secondly, both Democratic and Republican party politicians support US intervention on the side of the Saudis. Thirdly, covering the story in depth would require digging into US imperialist business leaders as merchants of death with sales of the most advance weapons to the reactionary Saudi regime.
News coverage of the Yemeni civil war would also reveal the double-dealing of the US government which pretends to be waging a war against Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist organizations yet is supplying them with funds and weapons as part of the Saudi-led forces. The Saudis are also allying themselves with the Zionist Israeli regime as partners in conflict with Iran.
Under the Obama regime, the US carried out drone warfare against the Houthis which resulted in some of its main leaders being assassinated, including anti-terrorist Imam, Salem bin ali Jaber. Those US drones bombed school buses and wedding receptions killing many civilians that the Obama administration labeled as mistakes and collateral damage.
Ever since May 8 when the Trump government announced that the US was pulling out of the 2015 agreement between world imperialist powers and Iran over its nuclear program, the US government has launched an aggressive offensive of speeches by members of the state department and the US military threatening war on Iran. The US aims to force Iran to end its nuclear program and its support for the Syrian regime and the Houthi freedom fighters in Yemen.
The Trump government, in typical gangster fashion, is using sanctions against the Iranian regime in an effort to starve Iranian people into submission to US imperialist dictate. The Trump regime believes that as the last remaining superpower it has the political right and military might to reorder the entire globe to its liking. The US sanctions against Iran are meant to disrupt the Iranian economy by requiring that its junior imperialist powers in the European Union and Great Britain support the US sanctions or have their trade with the US disrupted as well.
The aim of the US campaign against Iran is to clear the entire Middle East of regimes which are hostile to US domination of the oil-rich region. The US also requires recognition of the Zionist state of Israel. Already, the US is supporting Saudi Arabia’s bombarding Yemen with the most up to date military planes and battlefield equipment, sold to them by the US military industrial complex.
The war mongering assault by the US is a complete violation of the sovereignty and the right to self-determination of the Iranian people and state. Why should the US have the right to pick and choose who should rule in the other countries of the world? Why should only some countries have the right to nuclear weapons while claiming that others should be denied that right? Clearly the US imperialist government, which is the only government that has used nuclear bombs in war, can’t be that arbiter.
Trump has gotten on Twitter and created a straw man by announcing that the US government will go to war with Iran if they threaten the US. He wrote: “Never, ever threaten the US again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before”.
Of course Iran has not threatened the US; it has condemned US incursions on its territory and warned that it will defend their territory as is their right as a sovereign country. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif hit back at Trump’s tweet. “Color us unimpressed. The world heard even harsher bluster a few months ago. And Iranians have heard them- albeit more civilized ones- for 40 years. We’ve been around for millennia and seen the fall of empires, including our own, which lasted more than the life of some countries. BE CAUTIOUS!”
The US working class must take seriously Trump’s threats to wage war against Iran. We have a duty to oppose all US war plans by building up the anti-imperialist war movement here in the US. The Iranian people and state are not our enemies. Iran and other oppressed countries like North Korea and Venezuela are trying to live independent lives not dictated by US imperialism and need our support. The New Orleans Workers Group will work tirelessly to educate workers about our real interests and our internationalist duty to oppose US imperialist war.
