Newark NJ, January 19 – Over a dozen Progressive Labor Party members and friends attended a rally commemorating MLK Day by protesting racist ICE abductions across the U.S. We are currently facing a rising tide of fascism (see editorial on page 2) and must prepare to take the streets with students and workers every chance we get. In New Jersey, we called up students from local colleges, antiracist fighters against the genocide in Palestine, and fierce organizers against the murderous ICE jail, Delaney Hall, to join us at the nearest march. Our class is righteously fired up about the public execution of Renee Good, the murder of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent and the murder of ICE detainees like 41-year-old Jean Wilson Brutus, dying within days of detainment.
This murderous system has robbed our class, the working class, of too many people to name. The only way we can avenge our class is to fight to end this capitalist system and organize for the inevitable clash between the ruling class and the working class that is to come. If we organize for it, we can win the communist future that our class has the potential to win.
To strengthen our spears, our Party consistently stands beside antiracist fighters and families outside of Delaney Hall. We share CHALLENGE newspapers and host study groups, connecting police terror to the needs of this system—profit, war and imperialist competition, which is clearly leading us down a deadly road to World War 3. The bosses want our class to be under the boot of killer kkkops and ICE, long enough to figure out how to untangle the mess of their previous wars and expeditions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Latin America. As we prepare ourselves for what’s to come, we must bridge the confidence we have in our class to every worker, neighbor, and student, inviting them to join us in class struggle and build an internationalist Party that can contest the ruling class.
Liberalism poisons our class
A few days before the march, teachers, organizers, and parents met and exposed a connection between Delaney Hall and Newark Public Schools. Both corporate and state funded entities share Driscoll Foods as its food distributor. The same rotten food being fed to school children is killing workers like Brutus in Delaney Hall. Workers detained inside the ICE jail have complained of moldy or frozen food, freezing temperatures, and zero medical care. We decided to print this information on leaflets and call for every fighter at the rally to turn up at the upcoming Board of Education meeting.
The march’s organizers are known to be the mayor’s go-to for bringing out masses of workers and then ushering them behind the Democratic Party and collaborating with the police. This rally was no different. One speaker essentially declared that she didn’t want to abolish police but stop ICE from the fascist level of terror. Some fighters in the crowd boo’ed. We let out the chant: HOW DO YOU SPELL RACIST//G-O-P//HOW DO YOU SPELL MURDERERS//D-N-C. Some workers were taken aback by our boldness but still joined in. We made it our goal to not have the same few PL’ers chanting but to encourage fellow fighters to raise their voice, sharing printed versions of chant sheets that we made for the day.
Black workers are key to revolution
As we marched, undercover cops murdered a 43-year-old Black worker, Wali Bey. Newark’s Mayor, Ras Baraka’s weak response: “It is a heartbreaking tragedy for everyone involved when a police officer feels the need to draw a weapon—and so much more so
when they are compelled to fire.” The officer had no reason to draw the weapon, as Wali and another man were sitting in their car. The KKKops terrorized and shot them because police are given the rights under this system to murder in broad daylight and without impunity. Wali was a beloved member of the community and his murder exposes the contradictions of liberal responses to racist police terror under this capitalist regime. Baraka has built a base around the idea that Black workers and students, the primary targets of police terror under capitalism, could befriend and soften the nature of their captors, Killer KKKops in the Newark PD.
Days later, there was a statement released that officers could no longer wear a mask while patrolling the street. Not only is this reformist order too late; it’s a hollow peace offering in exchange for the life of a man and the lifelong trauma of his family and community. Wali’s family and supporters who were in Baraka’s base have protested outside of the local police precinct and disrupted the recent City Council meeting with chants to demand that they SAY HIS NAME. They are pressuring the local police and misleaders like Baraka to explicitly state what happened to Wali and are exposing the crimes that are inflicted against all of our class. One PL’er is related to Wali and is leading ways for our NJ section to support the family turning this tragedy into class struggle.
We have no time to lose
For Wali and the too many names of our class siblings slain by racist police and ICE, we must smash and bury this capitalist system. It is our role as antiracist communists during this period to also link struggles between racist ICE terror to racist KKKOP terror. Whether in the United States or anywhere in the world the horrors of capitalism are the same. Workers everywhere have the same needs and the same fight! Black, Latin, Asian, Arab, and white--workers of the world unite!
