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A Southern Tenant Farmers Union meeting in Arkansas, 1937. (Archive Photos / Getty Images)

This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly. W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia, S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy required challenging and remaking the larger system of exploitative capitalism that had subjected black and white Southerners to centuries of injustice. With the Congress of Industrial Organizations executing its Operation Dixie to organize industrial workers in the South that year and with African American veterans back from the war embarking on their own militant and heroic struggle for human rights there, Du Boiss insistence that the South had become the center of a new battle for freedom was in no way far from the truth.Ad Policy Books in Review

Part of the reason for this was that the struggle for civil rights and racial equality in the South had long been linked to activity in the economic sphere, where millions of white and black Southerners worked as sharecroppers and factory employees and in various low-wage jobs. During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the region the nations No. 1 economic problem, and there had always been an undercurrent of Southern-based radicalism that sought wide-ranging changenot only civil and political rights but also economic and social ones.

To add to this, beginning in the 1930s, many of the leaders and organizers in the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow were members of the Communist Party or its fellow travelers. From Harlem in New York City to Birmingham, Ala., black and white Communists organized across racial and class lines throughout the Great Depression and World War II to fight fascism abroad and hunger and racism at home. By the time the Southern Negro Youth Congress was organized, many involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement had been active in earlier Communist and Communist-affiliated groups. Others who were radicalized by the trial of the Scottsboro Boys and the Angelo Herndon case were exposed to many radical economic ideas and felt a particular loyalty to the left, having witnessed in both trials the Communist Party backing lawyers to take up the cause of black civil and legal rights in the South.

So when Du Bois spoke before a crowd of young black activists in the mid-1940s, he was preaching to the choir, because an ever-growing number of radical Southerners already agreed with him that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too. As Du Bois told them, the first and greatestallies are the white working classes about you, which had also been exploited by wealthy capitalists interested in dividing the Souths working class.

Mary Stantons new book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 19301950, helps recover this history through the story of one of the partys most important sections: District 17, a regional unit of the national party that was headquartered in industrial Birmingham and sought to coordinate efforts to organize white and black Southerners in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. During the Depression, World War II, and the early postwar years, the group was at the forefront of the struggle throughout the Deep South against police brutality, lynchings, and anti-free-speech laws. In terms of the number of members, it often punched above its weight: James S. Allen, a Communist organizer who wrote the memoir Organizing in the Depression South, estimated that in 1931 the party had fewer than 500 members in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. By chronicling the partys successful efforts to establish a foothold in Alabama during the 1930s and 40s, Stanton shows us that Communist organizers adopted a variety of organizing tools and resourcesincluding the International Labor Defense (ILD), the American section of the Cominterns legal armin order to win black Americans their rights and freedom in court. Highlighting how these black and white Communists built a multiracial movement through a series of highly publicized trials, Stanton illuminates how Communists in Alabama and elsewhere in the United States used the law not only to bring international attention to the worst of Jim Crow segregation but also to build solidarity across race and class lines. By doing the hard work of pursuing a legal strategy closely tied to a media strategy of publicizing numerous social injustices, Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Based primarily in Northern cities, the Communist Party started to plan its organizing campaign in the South in the early 1930s, a new view of the South as a key area of activism that Harry Haywood, a prominent black Communist based in Chicago, promulgated in The Communist in his 1933 essay The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States. His 1948 book Negro Liberation insisted, among other things, that American radicals needed to turn their attention to the fight for black political and economic rights in the so-called Black Belt, the fertile land sweeping south from Virginia through the heart of the former Confederacy to Louisiana. There a nation within a nation stood, and Communists, Haywood argued, could join in its struggle for self-determinationand by doing so build a base for revolution.

Haywoods arguments made a profound impression on his fellow Communists, both black and white, in the North. He first came across this idea while living in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and seeing the autonomous republics within the USSR, which provided a model for what he desired for African Americans in the South. The Depression only sharpened this insight. Hoping to expand the partys membership and reach in the rest of the United States, Haywood saw an opportunity to do just that by organizing the South.Current Issue

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However, as the Communist organizers arrived in different Southern cities, they found that they had to make changes on the fly to the idea Haywood promoted. As Stanton tells us, many of the black sharecroppers, miners, and industrial workers they encountered did not want to opt out of the system but rather to opt into it: They wanted to participate in the nations prosperity, to claim constitutional guarantees, and to assume a rightful place in society. This discovery left a profound mark on early Communist organizers and shaped much of the work they did in the South and in the North as well. Instead of focusing on an all-out revolution against Jim Crows entrenched segregation, they sought to help black Americans win their economic, political, and legal rights. Rather than a violent overthrow of the system, they mostly attempted to use various means of protest to win major victories on behalf of social and political reform.

Nationally, the Communists accepted this Popular Front approach, seeking to pursue social justice in all of its manifestations, and the experience of the Alabama Communists played an important role in shaping this evolution in American Communist thinking and in helping the party, as its vanguard, test the applications of this new approach. The Alabama Communist Party, after all, made up a considerable part of District 17. The threats these activists and their allies faced were stark. Even at the height of its popularity during the Great Depression, it was risky being a member of the Communist Party anywhere in the country, and organizing for civil rights and economic reform in Alabama was an even more dangerous prospect. District 17 became ground zero for the new reformism that ran through the party. Communists there could become active in both civil rights and labor organizing; they could reach out to black and white Southerners alike, form trade unions, and provide them with legal defense. As a result, they were a constant target of harassment and beatings, so much so that Stanton compares District17 to a firehousein a perennial state of emergency, running on adrenalin.

Stanton begins Red, Black, White with the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial. In 1931, nine young African American men were accused by two white women of raping them while they rode on a train traveling through Tennessee and Alabama. The NAACP was initially reluctant to take the case, so the ILD rushed to the Scottsboro Boys defense. The case soon rocketed to international prominence, primarily because of the unrelenting efforts of local Communist activists and the ILDs skillful use of publicity. Eventually, the state gave posthumous pardons to several of the young menOzie Powell, Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, Andy Wright.

The achievements of the ILD helped the Communist Party build some support among African Americans across the country, and Stanton traces how Communist organizers in Birmingham and the rest of District 17 used it to fuel activist campaigns throughout the Deep South. Even with the ILDs organizing, however, the Birmingham organizers struggled to craft a party structure that was able to withstand the heat of the anti-communism and anti-black racism that pervaded Alabamas political system in the 1930s and 40s. The party organization that had been developed in the North proved important in supporting the partys efforts in the South. Faced with laws explicitly designed to crack down on radical organizing, the national party sent lawyers to defend the organizers and helped publicize their cases. But District17 often found that it had to innovate its own tactics: investigating the lynchings and other murders of African Americans in the state, organizing local sharecropper unions and a reading group, and enlisting sympathetic local lawyers.Related Article

Stanton also discusses District 17s attempts to investigate police brutality in cities like Memphis in the 1930s. The hostility that the Communist organizers faced was attributable to their radical stance on racial equality as well as to their attempts to organize Southern workers. They were operating in a one-party system that constantly monitored and suppressed all forms of radical organizing, and the ghosts of the past haunted their work. In 1919 in Elaine, Ark., radicals were victims of the Red Summer racial pogrom sparked by attempts to organize black sharecroppers.

The struggles of union workers in Gastonia, N.C., in 1929 and the collapse of the textile workers strike in 1934 likewise showed how hostile Southern authorities were to any labor organizing, and many Communists there were forced to try a variety of tactics untested in the North. Often stretched thin trying to help out wherever they could, they ended up having to live in a state of what Stanton calls mind-numbing fear, but they nonetheless persevered and helped thousands in the American South make their desires for freedom known across the world.

While offering us a close view of local organizing, Stanton never loses sight of the larger story of American communism. She also situates District 17s activism within a larger history of radical activism and protest in the Deep South that helped plant the seeds for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The members of District 17 and the people they served recognized that theirs was but a local phase of a much broader worldwide struggle against not just fascism but all forms of imperialist and racist domination. Du Bois was not alone in making the connections between local struggles against Jim Crow and international struggles against capitalism. Black Southerners defended Ethiopia after it was invaded by Italy in 1935 and journeyed to Spain to fight Francos forces in the Spanish Civil War. They all saw their fight as the same one, against the same enemy, on multiple fronts.

As Stanton shows near the end of the book, the forces of reaction in the South were aware of this larger struggle, too, even as their attempts to crush the Communists and drive back interracial organizing became more successful in the postwar years, when Northerners and Southerners alike targeted labor and socialist organizers across the country, essentially forcing the left underground. The Second Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s dealt some severe blows, but the Communist Party left a legacy of grassroots organizing and agitation that would become part of the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Other books have covered at least a portion of this terrain before. Robin D.G. Kelleys landmark Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression is the best-known work on the partys operations in Alabama in this period. Glenda Gilmores Defying Dixie, John Egertons Speak Now Against the Day, and Patricia Sullivans Days of Hope also note that the fight against Jim Crow did not begin with the Supreme Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Taken together, these books tell a rich story that is often neglected or minimized in the mainstream narratives of Southern history. By excavating the roots of civil rights activism in the South that reach back to the 1930s, they remind us that the struggle for political and civil rights there was almost always twinned with the struggle for economic and social rights.

The role that Communists played in the civil rights movement of the postwar years is often suppressed or glossed over, if mentioned at all. Red, Black, White prompts us to remember a different Southern past, and Stanton shows us the more practical and down-to-earth nature of Communist organizing in the South as well. The partys activists arrived in the region with an ideological view of class struggle but adapted their tactics and strategy after listening to people on the ground. Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will is the memorable phrase coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but it could just as easily have been uttered by Alabamas Communists, both those from the South and those who traveled there to help organize it. These Communists risked nearly everything, and they did so knowing full well that their ideals might never be realized in their lifetimes. But they nonetheless persisted. Whether trying to save someone from lynching or struggling to organize workers in a Birmingham steel plant, it was, for nearly all of them, a matter of life or death.

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The Lost History of Southern Communism - The Nation

In the run-up to Chinas 13th National Peoples Congress on May 22, the chairman of its Standing Committee, Li Zhanshu, said how important it was that the session was being held in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic. Li remarked the session was being held at a time when overseas Covid-19 epidemic situations remain grim and complex, while in China major strategic achievements have been made.

Such differentiation between China and the rest of the world is likely to become more prominent in Chinese Communist Party, commonly known as CCP, rhetoric as the nations success is attributed to its socialist political system. The English version of the Peoples Daily commented in its coverage of the National Peoples Congress that foreigners will be looking to Chinas socialist system for enlightenment and guidance as they emerge from the shadow of the pandemic.

The CCP is now proclaiming its success over Covid-19 as a victory for President Xi Jinpings brand of Marxism.

Early in the war against coronavirus, it was predicted that the CCP would be one of the most high-profile casualties. But rumours of the CCPs demise were premature. As China deployed an increasingly vast and sophisticated surveillance system, the pandemic has accelerated the partys authority and control, not caused it to crumble.

While many countries declared war on Covid-19, China stressed it was a Peoples War. Such an analogy recalls the rhetoric of Mao Zedong, who called for a Peoples War to liberate China from the Imperial Japanese in 1938.

By talking about the pandemic in the same language, Xi identified the magnitude of the threat posed by Covid-19. But he also signified that the war would be waged according to the spirit, ideology and beliefs of the CCP and in an effort infused with Chinese socialist characteristics. Victory in this war will be a vindication of Xis Marxist strategy.

As a researcher of the uses of contemporary Marxism in bolstering ideas of citizen obligation and state legitimacy, I am looking at how China channels revolutionary analogies. Seventy years after the founding of the Peoples Republic, Xi has been notable in his efforts to re-establish Marxism at the heart of Chinese politics.

One of the key rationales Xi gives for the strengthening of Marxism is that the ideology can restore Chinas social cohesion. This is required to address the ills of hedonism, extravagance and corruption which have infected China as an inevitable result of opening up to the West.

As China recovers, its success in containing the virus is being put down to the devotion and solidarity of the people. Such claims are not unfounded: a World Health Organization-China joint mission report particularly praised the Chinese peoples solidarity and collective action during the pandemic. Such praise for solidarity will doubtless vindicate Xis efforts in creating a more cohesive and collectively minded populace.

Xi consistently asserts that Chinese leadership is guided by Marxisms scientific truth. An ambiguous term, Xi often explains this approach as one that uses Marxist theory to identify the best way to solve practical challenges. As the CCP deploys a mix of advanced technology and traditional socialist organisational models to tackle Covid-19, this will doubtless exemplify such practical use of Marxism.

Successfully tackling the outbreak is vital for the CCPs domestic legitimacy. Since the early years of the Peoples Republic of China, the promise of eradicating disease and improving the health of all has been at the centre of communist propaganda. Such focus has created an inextricable link between health and Chinese politics. Given this link, the war against Covid-19 was of vital importance for the CCPs legitimacy. Nonetheless, the global nature of the pandemic means that the success China has will also be judged in relation to how other countries, especially Western liberal states, handle the crisis.

Chinese state media claimed Chinas low death rate relative to other hard-hit countries was due to the superiority of socialist Chinas institutional framework. Such assertions have been made in the context of an ideological war with the West, stressing the benefits of Chinese socialism in relation to the weaknesses of Western capitalism.

In the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily, this political message was explicit: Covid-19 should make the people of Hong Kong, who have long been under the influence of Western ideology, recognise the benefits of the alternative socialist system.

In Marxist philosophy, progress comes through conflict. Chinese officials have evoked such belief, quoting Friedrich Engels in particular to claim that Comrade Xis new era will emerge stronger from its struggle with Covid-19. The CCP is already in the process of drafting a book to be published in multiple languages showcasing the key role of the CCP and Chinas socialist system in defeating the virus.

Rather than causing communist China to crumble, the virus will likely serve as a catalyst in Xis bid to present his brand of Marxism as a challenge to the global capitalist system.

Ruairidh Brown, Academic Tutor and Year One Coordinator in International Studies, University of Nottingham.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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China is using its coronavirus wins to push Xis brand of communism on the international stage - Scroll.in

The lockdowns and death in China began long before the first case of COVID-19 was ever reported. Though Xinjiang province is nearly 2,000 miles northwest of Wuhan where COVID-19 was first found, its also home to another virus in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom. Officially an atheist country, China technically recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. But while China seemingly promotes freedom of religion, nothing could be further from the truth.

These faiths teachings look very different in China, which routinely takes draconian measures to ensure each faith bows not to their God but to Chinas government officials and their communist ideals. The most prominent example of persecution is in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic and religious minorities live, including Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic minority group. The CCP began a crackdown on the Uighurs after clashes between the Uighur ethnic minority and Chinese police in Xinjiangs capital Urumqi in 2009. Afterwards, police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting off all cell phone service. The Uighurs plight has only worsened in recent years.

In 2014, President Xi Jinping gave a number of private speeches to CCP officials on the dangers of the Uighurs, calling on the CCP to unleash the tools of dictatorship to eliminate radical Islam in Xinjiang. Xi and the CCP believed the Uighurs and Muslims were extremists who threatened the country, though many reports said CCP police were largely responsible for the clashes in Urumqi.

Xi likened Islamic extremism to a virus-like contagion. Addressing it, Xi said, would require a period of painful, interventionary treatment. Though the Uighurs had lived in this region since ancient times, their presence in China was now considered nothing more than a dangerous disease threatening the CCP and one which needed to be eradicated at all costs. Alarmingly, reports have surfaced of a genocide against the Uighurs. This should have human rights activists and the world very concerned.

Right now, nearly a million Uighurs sit in indoctrination camps, essentially concentration camps designed for brainwashing, forced labor and ridding the Uighurs of their religious differences. These concentration camps have the largest network since the Holocaust. Most days in these camps are spent listening to lectures against the Islamic religion, studying CCP propaganda and singing songs praising President Xi, wishing him a long life. Children are separated from their parents, who are sent to work in factories with no permission to quit unless approved by several government officials.

It doesnt take much for Uighurs to be sent to these camps, either. Reasons for detainment can be faith-based, like reciting Arabic prayers or simply based on physical appearance, like having long beards (a common characteristic for Islamic minorities) or refusing to smoke or drink alcohol. Residents in Xinjiang can see their Uighur neighbors one day, only to have them disappear the next, with no information of their whereabouts. Most are sent to the indoctrination camps or to forced labor factories, where they make materials for well-known companies like Apple and Nike. Other religions in China are also being persecuted by the CCP.

As Christianity grows in China, theyve also become targets. Reports detail crosses being burned in Christian churches, often replaced with the Chinese flag or photos of Xi. Christians are forced to renounce their faith. Churches are required to install facial-recognition cameras. If they refuse, the CCP quickly shuts them down. When bibles were pulled from online bookstores in China, Beijing released new guidelines encouraging churches to localize religion, practice the core values of socialism and actively explore religious thought according to China's national circumstances.

Other religions are also being victimized. In Tibet, over 1.2 million Buddhists have been killed since 1949. Nearly 6,000 monasteries and shrines have been destroyed. The State Department's 2018 report on international religious freedom describes the repression of Buddhists in Tibet as severe, with reports of forced disappearance, prolonged detention without trial and arrests based on individuals faith.

The list of violent persecution seems endless. One thing is clear: In China, differences in thought are not celebrated theyre eliminated -- and religions wanting to exist must celebrate communism at their core. When we discuss repression and authoritarianism in the world, we must look at religious minorities in China. They are victims of the ruthless communist ideology which leaves no room for freedom in any way, shape or form. Chinas government must answer for this systemic oppression and end it immediately.

This is why Congress intends to pass legislation imposing sanctions on any government including Chinas found persecuting Uighurs and other minorities. If we believe we must defend the truly defenseless, we must stand up for the Uighurs and religious minorities in China. They deserve freedom and the world demands it.

Congressman Michael WaltzMichael WaltzThe real virus to the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom 125 lawmakers urge Trump administration to support National Guard troops amid pandemic Trump campaign launches new fundraising program with House Republicans MORE represents Floridas 6th District in Congress and is a member of the China Task Force.

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The real virus to the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom | TheHill - The Hill

The brutal murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25 has sparked a wave of protests across the United States.Thousands of people took the streets of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities, demonstrating against police repression and demanding justice for Floyd and the other victims of police brutality.Since the tragic incident became known, several communist and left political forces in the U.S. have strongly condemned the murder of George Floyd, expressing their solidarity and support to the protesters across the country. Below you can read some of the statements:

PARTY OF COMMUNISTS, USA (PCUSA)

The murder of George Floyd is an act of police terror and cowardice that demonstrates the total disregard for the human rights and dignity of the poor and working-class peoples. An unarmed and innocent African-American was slowly executed by peace officers who are entrusted and sworn to protect their fellow citizens. The Party of Communists USA strongly condemns the recent murder of George Floyd by white supremacist officers of the Minneapolis Police Department on Monday, May 25, 2020. What the Minneapolis Police Department and the City of Minneapolis have proven once again is that they protect the privileges, property, and the power structure of the monopoly capitalist class. NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE STRANGE FRUIT! A communist, Abel Meeropol wrote the poem in 1937 that became a song performed by Billie Holiday in 1939.

Things have gotten worse since William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson presented the WE CHARGE GENOCIDE!* petition to the United Nations in 1951. Nothing will change until we as a nation of people truthfully and openly question the mentality of profits over people in the United States. Monopoly capitalism never died in the Americas! It continually persists, exemplified by the events in Minneapolis, with its victims being the poor and working-class members of society!

Just as our brother George Floyd was asphyxiated, so too are the poor and working peoples of the United States. The Party of Communists USA demands:

STOP GENOCIDE!

AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL!

THE LIVES OF THE POOR AND WORKING-CLASS MATTER!

SOLIDARITY WITH ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLES!

* * *

COMMUNIST PARTY, USA (CPUSA)

The Communist Party USA joins with the people of Minneapolis in demanding the immediate arrest and prosecution of the cops responsible for the murder of George Floyd.

The horrifying eight-minute evidence, streamed around the world, is clear and undisguisable. It reveals that the murder of George Floyd was a public execution by the police. The refusal to immediately make arrests has understandably sparked rage in Minneapolis and around the country. Once again, I cant breathe has become the battle cry of millions. Make no mistake, the protests will continue until justice is done.

Minneapoliss rebellion is the fault not of the protestors but of the system of institutionalized racism and violence that allows such atrocities to occur in the first place. These racist murders are occurring over and over, alive and in living color, and most often without prosecutionits a wonder more rebellions havent occurred.

Donald Trumps irresponsible threat to shoot the looters is as contemptuous as it is predictable. We recall with disgust his threat to order troops to shoot immigrants on the U.S./Mexico border. Indeed, threats of violence are a regular part of his tool kit. In fact, he openly encourages police forces to manhandle those arrested. It is Trump who is the thug-in-chief.

Trumps use of racism as a central organizing tool will only end with his defeat in November. But the country cannot wait to address the epidemic of racist violence. Congress, state legislatures, city councils, labor leaders, clergy, and representatives of community organizations of every stripe across the country must address the crisis. The time is way past due for community control of the police. In the first place, neo-Nazi, KKK, and other neo-fascist elements must be driven out of police departments around the country. Investigate that! In addition, our country needs a radical reform of policing.

Compounding the routine violence against African Americans is the impact of COVID-19 on working-class communities of color in all aspects. They are the ones dying in inordinate proportions. They are the first to serve on the front lines and, like in any war, the first to die.

We call on our members and friends to join the protests for justice in every way possible and to make justice for George Floyd part of every demonstration going forward.

Our hearts, prayers, and solidarity go out to George Floyds family and to Floyd himself, who cried out for his deceased mother while a thug sat on his neck. We say, rise up and protest. We join with millions demanding justice now!

* * *

FREEDOM ROAD SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION (FRSO)

The people of Minneapolis have taken to the streets the past 72 hours, demanding the arrest of the killer cops who murdered 46-year-old African American George Floyd on Monday night, May 25. Eyewitness video was released Tuesday morning showing now former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd the ground, with Chauvins knee directly on the back of his neck the video shows Floyds last gasps for air. You can hear him telling the killer cop that he cant breathe and calling for his mother before you see his body going limp. Three other cops on the scene stand by, with two other cops actively helping to restrain Floyd on the ground, all ignoring the pleas of bystanders to let him breathe. Since then, tens of thousands in Minneapolis and have taken to the streets, demanding justice and retribution, which prompted the Minneapolis police to immediately terminate the four officers involved with Floyds murder and finally to charge and jail Chauvin May 29.

We cant forget that Twin Cities area police have been the target of recent high-profile struggles involving police murders, including the murder in 2015 of African American man Jamar Clark by two killer Minneapolis killer cops, which prompted a wave of protests; the murder of Philando Castile in the suburbs of Minneapolis on video, as well Justine Damond in 2017, which also prompted mass protests.

The question of killer cops targeting African Americans isnt just a story of Black people being more oppressed workers, its also the result of the system of national oppression, a system that chains down African Americans and subjects them to the most intense methods of brutality at the hands of the ruling class and its police force. From Minneapolis to Louisville, we see a disregard for Black life at the hands of the police, with the Minneapolis rebellion becoming a breaking point for the Black liberation movement, sparking nationwide protests.

As Martin Luther King Jr, once said, A riot is the language of the unheard.

We must continue the call to demand community control of the police as well as the indictment and convictions of all killer cops, especially those who murdered George Floyd. We must also, as what weve seen in Chicago with the LaQuan McDonald cover-up, fight to kick out government attorneys and prosecutors who refuse to prosecute killer cops and racist vigilantes, as they did initially in the case of Ahmaud Arberys lynching in Brunswick, Georgia.

On May 30, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is calling for a day of nationwide protests against the murderous policies of police departments nationwide as well as demand the mass release of inmates in prisons due to COVID-19. We unite with this call and know that the more people that hit the streets, the shakier the foundations of national oppression in this country becomes. Protests have already started taking place in cities like Memphis and Los Angeles, with many cities planning protests through the week leading into the weekend.

Our job is to organize, agitate and connect the struggle for Justice for George Floyd, Justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Justice for Breonna Taylor to our own local struggles for justice and community control of the police. We need to build organization on both a local and national levels to consolidate the power of the people into a fighting force against national oppression and the criminal injustice system.

The streets are on fire for action and our job is to continue to fan the flames.

Justice for George Floyd! Indict and convict the killer cops! Community control of the police now!

All power to the people!

* * *

WORKERS' WORLD

The corporate media call the May 27 protest in Minneapolis a riot. In a speech on March 14, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined that term, saying, A riot is the language of the unheard. Following his assassination less than a month later, Black people rose up in hundreds of cities in righteous protest. They were heard.

So was the Black population of Minneapolis. During the May 27 action, community members broke the windows and slashed the tires of a long line of police cars while arrogant cops drove them. The community, united in action, raised one powerful voice to say: We are all George Floyd meaning that any one of them could wind up a victim of a police lynching at any place or time.

The protests responded to the May 25 videotaped lynching of a Black man, George Floyd. Everyone who watched the video saw a white racist cop, Derek Chauvin, choke Floyd to death with his knee as he was begging for his mother and his life while three other cops, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J. Alexander Kueng, did nothing to stop this atrocity.

The long unheard Black community in Minneapolis only needed a spark Floyds execution to arouse its collective anger built up during years of humiliating police occupation, harassment, beatings and arrests and rise up. Even the statistics justify their anger: Of those police shot in Minneapolis from late 2009 to May 2019, some 60 percent were from the Black community though they make up only 20 percent of the total population. (New York Times, May 28)

Righteous protesters broke the windows of the Third Precinct Headquarters where the four fired cops were once based. They picked up tear gas canisters the cops targeted at them and threw them back at the police. They burned or expropriated goods from AutoZone, Target and other businesses.

A class view of violence

Once the protests moved from peaceful on May 26 to direct action on May 27, the corporate media rushed to defend the capitalists sacred private property and labeled some protesters violent. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other officials called for calm.

This posturing repeats the standard attempt by capitalist politicians who seek to drive a wedge between the masses on the issue of nonviolence.

They focused on the same argument in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965; in Newark, N.J., and Detroit in 1967; in the hundreds of uprisings following Kings assassination in 1968; the Miami rebellion of 1980; the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992; and Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

In his 1992 pamphlet, A Marxist Defense of the LA Rebellion, Workers World Party chairperson Sam Marcy wrote: In times when the bourgeoisie is up against the wall, when the masses have risen suddenly and unexpectedly, the bourgeoisie gets most lyrical in abjuring violence. It conjures up all sorts of lies and deceits about the unruliness of a few among the masses as against the orderly law-abiding many.

Marxism here again cuts through it all. The Marxist view of violence flows from an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses. Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.

Indeed, Marxists do prefer nonviolent methods if the objectives the masses seek freedom from oppression and exploitation can be obtained that way. But Marxism explains the historical evolution of the class struggle as well as the struggle of oppressed nations as against oppressors.

There are two factors that these multigenerational events have in common: First, they were ignited by police terror, especially killings of Black people; and second, they were major rebellions, carried out by the oppressed and their allies against their oppression due to decades-long inhumane conditions caused by capitalism.

Rebellions scare the hell out of the billionaire ruling class that wants to keep hidden its super-exploitation of the workers and oppressed. But when rebellions do break out, the ruling class will unleash its state apparatus the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the National Guard and even the Army in an attempt to terrorize neo-colonized peoples in the Black, Brown and Indigenous communities.

When the masses rebel, they are not only rebelling against the state, but they are rebelling against an oppressive system that denies them the basic necessities of life jobs, housing, health care, education and the right to live free from all forms of oppression, etc. in order to fulfill the inherent profit drive of capitalism.

As Marcy emphasizes, any spontaneous or unorganized violence from the oppressed is self-defense against the organized armed force of the state. There is no equal sign between the two; they represent two distinct, antagonistic social classes.

From diverse ideological perspectives, what both King and Marcy stated connect to todays events in south Minneapolis

However any oppressed community sees fit to fight back against legal and extralegal terrorism be it the police or neofascists alongside mainly antiracist white youth, is justified. It should be supported and defended against the slanderous attacks and lies propagated by right-wing and even so-called liberal media and politicians, whose primary objective is to apologize for a rotten system living on borrowed time.

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PARTY FOR SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION (PSL)

We salute the thousands of Minneapolis, Minnesota residents who came out in justified indignation to demand justice for George Floyd. Demonstrators of all backgrounds and ages took to the streets the day after Floyds killing and were met with violent police repression. Police in riot gear used mace, tear gas and bean bag guns to repress the righteous anger of the people of Minneapolis.

It was only four years ago that Minneapolis mourned Philando Castile, a Black man also shot to death by police. His killer, Jeronimo Yanez, was let off and found not guilty at trial. The police killing of Castile sparked protests around the country.

This latest incident of state-sanctioned racist terror comes on the heels of a string of police and vigilante killings that have taken place since the COVID-19 crisis began in the United States. Though in some parts of the country lockdowns and quarantine measures are in effect, the oppression of Black people still remains and has in fact surged in the wake of one of the largest public health crises in recent history.

A video capturing the killing of George Floyd was posted on Facebook and sparked widespread outrage and protest. In the video, Floyd is seen pinned to the ground by his neck, face pressed against the ground so hard that his nose bled, and is heard repeatedly gasping I cant breathe. While Floyd was on the ground, officer Derek Chauvin pushed his knee into the back of Floyds neck, choking him for several minutes. As multiple bystanders pleaded with the officers to get off of Floyds neck, he became unresponsive and was taken by ambulance to the Hennepin County Medical Center. He was later pronounced dead. George Floyds last words, I cant breathe are the exact same last words of Eric Garner, who was strangled to death by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in 2014.

The officers claimed they were responding to a forgery in progress, a possible non-violent crime. The officers alleged that the unarmed Floyd was resisting arrest, however they later changed their story, asserting that he was suffering from medical distress. It is outrageous that police would use such brutal deadly tactics on a person in medical distress, let alone anyone.

We cannot depend on the Federal Bureau of Investigations, which has begun to look into the killing, for justice. The FBI is a violent state institution that has been wielded as a weapon against the liberation movement of Black people in the United States. The FBI has never been fair and partial to the Black community. Real justice will be brought about when the people organize and fight for their own demands in the face of racist oppression by the U.S. capitalist state. The police will always fulfill their role of being shock troops for white supremacy and capitalism as long as it exists in this racist state.

In this absolutely critical period, we sharpen our resolve to build organizations capable of waging militant class struggle against the racist state and their ruling class. The ruling class and its government has only shown complete disregard for the lives of millions of working-class people during the COVID-19 crisis, especially Black people who are disproportionately victims of the virus. Amidst the deep crisis, the racist killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. and Sean Reed in Indianapolis, Ind., make it clear that the protests and fight back must continue and intensify. We affirm and support the right of Black people and all oppressed people to protest and defend themselves against racist terror.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation demands that the four officers involved in Floyds murder be prosecuted and convicted. We also demand the end of the repression of the demonstrators in Minneapolis demanding justice and accountability during a health and economic crisis.

Justice for George Floyd and all victims of racist police terror!

Excerpt from:
George Floyd's Murder: U.S. Communist and Left Parties in solidarity with the protesters - In Defense of Communism

by Peter Baehr

When I arrived in Hong Kong from Canada in August 2000, to take up a professorship in sociology, I was struck at once by the openness of the citys academic culture. Put crudely, yet accurately, there was no political correctness in Hong Kong, no ideological policing of minds. The streets might be polluted by smog, but on campus the air was bracing.

Today Hong Kong is menaced by a different force, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As the Party tightens its grip on the city, with new national security laws, what can Hong Kong universities do to impede the curbs on academic freedom for which Communist states are notorious?

Answering this question requires us to recall what academic freedom is; to clarify the nature of the organisation that will attack it; and to be realistic about the support Hong Kong academics can expect from their Western counterparts.

Academic freedom is not the liberty for professors to do or say anything they please. Academic freedom is a norm which states that university professors should be free to teach, research and write on academic matters unconstrained by political and other kinds of interference.

Political activism in the classroom is not an exercise of academic freedom; it is the mirror image of state propaganda. And state propaganda is a speciality of Communism.

All Communist parties govern in essentially the same way. They replicate the Party structure at the granular level across all sectors of state and society: legislative assemblies, the law courts, the civil service, trade unions, the media, schools and universities.

The Party controls its subjects through a combination of ideology, fear and material incentives. Loyalty is valued more highly by the regime than competence. Ideology is valued more highly than creativity. And, everywhere, the expression of thought, especially in writing, is closely monitored for dissent.

Because academic freedom is, in its modern form, a Western concept, it would be reassuring for Hong Kong professors to count on their Western counterparts for support against Communist censorship.

But is that likely? Only from some quarters. Across much of the Western world and in Australasia too the public use of reason, and the existence of open debate, are in full retreat, threatened by an alliance of non-academic administrators, student activists, and academics who demand unanimity on all important matters.

Speakers with unpopular views are disinvited from campus or no-platformed. Political tests are administered as in the University of California system to appraise a job applicants attitude to diversity. Complex questions in class are reduced to ideological formulae.

And Marxism remains robust among the professoriat, either as a default critique of capitalism or reconfigured, with contortions that would have astonished Marx himself, as identity politics. In short, the CCP has nothing to fear from an influential section of Western academics.

Outside this unworldly stratum, however, a more critical attitude to China is emerging. As the CCPs soft power evaporates in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, its brutality is becoming plainer to Western governments, or at least harder to ignore.

The US, Canada, Australia and Britain have variously protested at Chinas Covid obfuscations: its silencing of domestic whistleblowers, its manipulation of a credulous WHO directorate, its threats to cut off medicines, and its public lies, notably the claim that the West was the source of the coronavirus.

Western governments were powerless to stop the internment of a million Uighurs. These same governments are not helpless to call the CCP to account post-Covid and transform their political and economic relationships with it.

Where does all this leave the Hong Kong academy? Co-authors and co-researchers abroad are likely to support us in any way they can. So will external examiners and reviewers of research grant applications.

The Hong Kong Research Grants Council an advisory body has several foreign experts on its panels. Western governments are also paying attention to what is happening in the city.

But it is obvious that we in Hong Kong must rely chiefly on our own actions and on the tradition of independence and plurality of which we are the fortunate beneficiaries. To uphold this tradition, I am calling on:

People subject to terror cannot be blamed for keeping quiet and inwardly emigrating. That is not yet our condition. Hong Kong universities are still free to discuss unseasonable ideas and professors are still able to write opinion pieces such as this one.

But the window is closing. Acquiescence and opportunism are the great temptations now, the stilling of voices voluntarily in anticipation of their silencing.

Academics especially their professional associations administrators, and students in Hong Kong are advised, as a matter of urgency, to work together in the coming months to craft a Hong Kong Charter of Academic Freedom.

If nothing else, the breach of academic freedom by the CCP, together with a host of other liberties, will then be fully visible not just to Hong Kong people but to all of those among the international community who still care about the life of the mind.

Peter Baehr is a Research Professor in Social Theory at Lingnan University.

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Hong Kong must now rely on its own efforts to protect academic freedom - Hong Kong Free Press