Justice For Tyre Nichols!

The brutal murder of 29-year-old African American Tyre Nichols by five police officers on January 7 in Memphis, Tennessee, brought memories of George Floyd's murder in 2020, sparking nationwide protests against police violence and racial discrimination.

In a statement, the African American Equality Commission of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) writes:

The Communist Party USA condemns the recent brutal police killings of Tyre Nichols, Keenan Anderson, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran (aka Tortuguita), and Herman Whitfield III. We demand justice for all victims of police crimes and terror, and an end to police killing Black people and the mentally ill.

Lenin on racism in the United States

In an article written in late January-early February 1913, under the title "Russians and Negroes", Vladimir Ilyich Lenin attempts a brief comparison between the then situation of the black people in the United States and the Russian people under the tsarist regime. 

The article, signed by Lenin as "W", was written during a period of severe censorship. It was first published in 1925 in "Krasnaya Niva" magazine.

Black Lives Matter- but, not in Capitalism

COMMENTARY:

The recent murder of 37-year old African American Alton Sterling by police in Louisiana is another tragic episode in the long chain of racist crimes in the U.S. The United States of America- the metropolis of Capitalism- has a devastating tradition of racial discrimination. A tradition of human chattel slavery back in the 18^th and 19^th century, of lynchings and mob violence against African-Americans, of racial segregation and discrimination against black people in the post WW2 decades.

Racism is an inseparable element of the capitalist exploitative system; it is in the very nature of Capitalism to produce, promote and feed racism. After all, the exploitation of the working class by the capitalists becomes easier and more effective when there are divisions among workers. For that, racism consists a valuable tool of the capitalist establishment in creating disunity within workers. What is best for the exploitative system rather than a splitted working class, filled with racist poison?

Writing for TIME magazine, after the murder of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, the former basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was correctly pointing out: “And, unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class warfare” (TIME, 17 Aug. 2014).