Racism Protects the Capitalist System – Only the Working Class Can Eradicate it 

The severity of the crimes committed by the representatives of the bourgeois State in recent weeks and the strength of the proletariat’s response to them certainly prompts a search for historical comparisons. The protests and riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 come immediately to mind, as do those that followed the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King in 1992.

In the more recent past, one can turn to the uprising in Baltimore in 2015, prompted by the police murder of Freddie Gray (for which, it should be noted, no cop was ever convicted).

These events and others like them are connected by the intensity of the black proletariat’s response to persecution. Yet the same type of events continue to occur, the same cycle of brutality and murder, despite vigorous responses like the one in the present moment. Why does bourgeois violence continue, and what will stop it?

Rosa Luxemburg commented in 1919 that “the best defense is a strong blow”.

This was in her final essay, written only hours before she was abducted and murdered for her role in the failed Spartacist uprising.

The bourgeoisie appropriate laborpower by forcing the proletariat to sell it for the minimum possible wage in order to survive. This is the foundation of racism in the United States.

Workers of color earn far less than white workers for the same labor, which makes labor in general cheaper to buy and increases profits for the bourgeoisie. So long as workers, divided by race, are forced to compete against each other, everyone’s wage is kept low, and workers’ power is limited. The police enforce this social order within the country, and the military enforces it abroad through imperialist wars. Whites are taught a pack of racist lies, preached from the very top of society, to dissuade them from recognizing their common cause with workers of other races.

The present antiracist movement makes a serious mistake when it separates itself from the class basis of racism, continuing political action solely along racial lines in hopes of appealing to the bourgeois State. It has stopped short of openly declaring the role of law enforcement and the military in the maintenance of the capitalist State and the political domination of the bourgeoisie. For people of color, and for the proletariat as a whole, the solution lies in the conquest of political power away from the State, not in appealing to it.

The proletariat’s ownership of laborpower holds the solution to its misery. Labor action is the answer to racist violence.

As an old IWW song says, “without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn”.

The wheels that keep money pouring into corporations must be jammed. Strikes and other workplace actions do this by removing the labor component of the accumulation of capital.

Strikes in certain critical parts of the economy can have a disproportionate impact on the whole. Logistics and transportation strikes are especially damaging to capital because they prevent commodities from getting to market. It is no coincidence that those who work in warehouses and make deliveries are some of the most exploited people in the country, and that their efforts to unionize at companies like Amazon have been suppressed. Workers in stores can also have a powerful impact because their absence prevents commodities from being sold. Many of these workers are people of color from the same communities that the police constantly terrorize. Educators also have an important role to play. Their strikes impact the entire economy because the bourgeoisie relies on schools toprovide childcare while parents are at work. Teachers have suffered from the police invasion of public schools over the past 25 years, and see firsthand how the racist policing system impacts young people. They have every reason to strike against it.

The regime trade unions will certainly resist these actions. They exist to diffuse the workers’ struggle by directing it in legalistic, electoral, and bureaucratic directions. New workingclass bodies need to be formed against these collaborationist trade unions.

Workers’ assemblies should form in every workplace and within every existing trade union.

Workers themselves will coordinate their response to the oppression they face, not union bureaucrats. The role of the International Communist Party is to build upon these immediate struggles so that the workers are prepared when the revolutionary moment arrives.

Witness how workers protected themselves from the pandemic

The labor actions that took place early in the Covid19 pandemic show the power that strikes have in effecting immediate change. A wave of strikes broke out in March and April as employers put workers’ health at risk. Most of these were wildcat strikes, organized without union approval or in nonunionized workplaces. Because workers in over 300 workplaces, involving tens of thousands of workers dared to walk off the job to protect themselves and their fellow workers, the strikers rapidly won concessions from their bosses, including safer working conditions and sick pay.

Form Workers’ Assemblies

Labor actions need to be coordinated in order to tackle serious threats to workers’ interests. Workers’ assemblies are necessary to organize efforts to fight racism and its capitalist foundations. The effects of strikes and other actions in individual workplaces are mostly limited to those specific places. Strikes by teachers and auto workers in the past two years have shown that large, wellcoordinated actions are effective far beyond the workplace or the region in which they occur, even influencing other industries. At the same time, coordination can only grow from specific workplaces and locations, as it did in those cases. Workers’ assemblies are venues where people come together as members of their class to plan and act for its interests.

Support the protests

The extent of the protests that emerged following George Floyd’s murder shows that workers across the country recognize that his death was one example of the present system’s general tendency to abuse people of color. Not everyone recognizes that this system is capitalism, and that racist violence is a component of the bourgeoisie’s war against the proletariat, but they recognize the different instances of police brutality are in no way separate. Communists’ role in times of protest is to show the masses that capitalism is the root of the problem against which they are demonstrating, and that revolution is the only means to stop it.

The working class has the power to transform society

What the COVID 19 quarantine proved was who generates wealth in capitalist society: workers. When we stopped working capitalist wealth collapsed. If we generate the wealth, doesn’t it make sense we build society? And if we build it, can we not transform it in any manner we decide to?

Workers!
Your only defense is in organization and struggle as a class
The answer to racism is communist revolution!