Translated by Petr Yakovlev

On May 25, an American policeman once again killed just another black man. True, now on camera and sadistic asphyxiation. As a result, American society flared up again with mass protests and pogroms. It all goes back to Baltimore, Ferguson, or even the most likely legendary Los Angeles riot.

As noted earlier, strikes, protest rallies, and pogroms have not frightened the bourgeoisie for a long time, as they have been turned into a kind of Gaponism (take attention away from the social revolution). Moreover, no heat of senseless violence is fundamentally capable of harming either the rule of capital or the power system of the bourgeoisie. Rebels can defeat at least all police stations in the United States, plunder all stores and burn all expensive cars, but the dominance of American clans of financial magnates is neither cold nor hot.

About the program of the American bourgeoisie, Trump let slip with his sharp tongue. He said that he would not allow „criminals holding radical leftist views to set fire to communities throughout our country and the world“.

The main thing for the American oligarchs is that the popular movement does not proceed constructively, does not have an organized focus on the overthrow of the power of capital.

Thousands and thousands of propagandists have been introducing ignorance into the public consciousness for more than a hundred years, including cultivating the image of a pogrom-maker, an avenger, a crazy rioter.

The annoying denunciation of communist revolutions, the endless floods of lies and filth on Marxism and Marxists in the minds of the masses stop access to the scientific formulation of questions of power, of the essence of the economic system and the alternative to capitalism.

Dozens of scientists, journalists, and politicians of various stripes delve into the „sub-carpet wrestling“ of American riots and pogroms. „There are gangs of Soroslets (from „Soros + piglets“ — trans.) operating!“ — some of them shout. „Pogroms provoked a tea party by the hands of police provocateurs!“ — others claim. Perhaps many political forces would like to control this black element of the rebels therefore, there on squares and in lanes probably operating provocateurs and „Soroslets“ and God knows who else. But the essence of the process is beyond their control, is different.

World capitalism is undergoing a global crisis of overproduction. A market economy is cracking at the seams. The oligarchs in all countries shift the burden of the crisis onto the working people and the masses. Bourgeois governments synchronously undercover the global lockout by the quarantine against a pandemic.

The American oligarchs, as the most thoroughbred bourgeois on Earth, immediately threw millions of workers, mostly, of course, „colored“, that is, African Americans, Latinos and Asians, onto the streets. The standard of living of the population in the United States is rapidly falling, the oligarchs are rapidly getting richer. Discontent is growing, a hot phase of active protest of the impoverished masses is beginning. Some of them with weapons in their hands demand an end to the lockout, and the others break out due to racial murder and police arbitrariness. In that is the point, even at the first approximation.

The proletarian masses in all bourgeois countries understand and feel the monstrous degree of exploitation. Handfuls of oligarchs get richer at cosmic speed, but the majority barely pull the strap. Therefore, the masses of people, being politically blind, infected by bourgeois propaganda and culture, are striving to at least somehow compensate for the amount of value exhausted by capital … through the pogrom and pillage of shops. They take out the accumulated class hatred in a completely destructive, capitalist-safe way.

The paradox of the current situation in the USA is that the more African Americans will destroy the material values in the current phase of the crisis, that will be better for the bourgeois economy that is „overheated“ by overproduction. In this sense, capitalism is a self-regulatory system: the economic balance is restored due to the suffering, tears, blood of the three main groups of American simpletons. Some sit and suffer a lockout, others smash American cities, and still others beat the rioters with all their strength. And they are all sure that at the next election they will vote for the „right“ animal (donkey or elephant), which supposedly will improve their fate. But bad luck! Both of these beasts have long been tamed in the stall of Wall Street financial magnates, the true owners of the United States of America.

Hundreds of scientists, journalists, politicians of various stripes delve into the racial problems of the United States. They say, white Americans are racists, therefore African Americans in the USA live a hard life, including they are killed by polizeis, which periodically leads to „racial riots“. „How to get rid of evil racism?“ — That’s what kind of question these simpletons paid by the bourgeoisie are puzzling.

Protest leaders act in the same logic, raising the banner with the phrase „Black Lives Matter”. It seems that the phrase was composed by a white intellectual, who looks down on African Americans. If we compare the „program“ of the Black Lives Matter movement even with the demands of the Black Panther Party and the Boston speech of H. Newton, then there is a clear intellectual degradation of the African Americans movement, especially its leaders. What can we expect from ordinary protesters if their leaders seem to have swallowed their tongues and instead of a political program offer common words to their people.

Why the matter of fact isn’t racism? Because racism (in the sense of domestic hatred of representatives of other races) is a consequence, not the reason, for the real deplorable economic and political position of African Americans in the USA. African Americans are the descendants of slaves brought in as cattle from enslaved Africa. And the abolition of slavery in 1865 did not change the essence of their situation, because under capitalism the weaker you are, the more you are oppressed and humiliated. And who can be weaker than yesterday’s plantation slaves?

Today, the American „colored“ are the very bottom of bourgeois society. The cheapest, disenfranchised labour force and the mass of undereducated lumpen proletarians who do odd jobs and living on benefits.

„Americans of African, Asian, and Hispanic descent account for only 36 percent of the total US workforce, but they make up 58 percent of agricultural workers, 70 percent of maids and cleaners, and 74 percent of baggage workers, baggage carriers, and porters. The average salary in these jobs is much lower than the average salary in all sectors of the United States.

… Over the past 40 years, the unemployment rate among African-American workers has always doubled the unemployment rate among Whites. Over the past decade, the expansion of the US labour market has not at all eliminated the racial differences of a systematic nature in the labor market. Among those who worked full-time throughout 2018, African American men earned 70.2 cents, white women 78.6 cents, and African American women 61.9 cents for every dollar earned by white men … Average wealth and the welfare of the white family is almost 10 times greater than that of the African American family.

… Public schools in predominantly white school districts in the United States receive $ 23 billion more annually than in school districts, where mostly white children study. In 2016, in predominantly white school districts, per capita funding averaged $ 13,908, while this figure in school districts, which mainly serve people of color, amounted to only $ 11,682. At the same time, the number of students in predominantly white districts averages only 1,500, and this figure in predominantly non-white school districts exceeds 10,000, which is about six times more than in the first“(Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2019).

To understand the causal link between racism and economic interests, one should ask oneself: were the Africans taken into slavery out of racist motives or at the behest of economic interests? First, they developed racist theories about the lower and higher races, and then on their basis they turned them into slavery, or, conversely, on the basis of thirst for profit turned them into slavery, and then adjusted theories to this matter? The answer is obvious, basis relations determine ideology.

Therefore, white racists hate African Americans not because of differences in skin color, lack of culture, „black crime“ and so on. The ideology of this hatred is formed on the foundation of economic interests, class oppression and continues to be fueled by the benefits of many whites (even proletarians) from the bestial position of African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, who make up more than a third of the proletarian mass. And skin color and cultural differences are completely superficial. It is the low social position that is the real cause of racism towards African Americans and the reciprocal racism of African Americans to whites, as to the representatives of the bourgeoisie.

Consequently, the cultural backwardness and wretchedness of the African Americans population of the United States are not dictated by the imaginary defects of their race, but by the fact that American and European imperialism deliberately limited the majority of the peoples of the planet in their development for hundreds of years, including turning Africans into slavery. And in our time, as you can see, the American bourgeoisie and its government, even within their own country, are doing a lot to leave African Americans, Hispanics and Asians in a mire of wretchedness: they deprive them of access to education, are stifled by administrative barriers, low salaries, corrupting benefits, and instilling nationalism and racism.

Enforcing silly behaviors and various ridiculous prohibitions is actually offensive to African Americans. The oppressed people, in fact, second-rate-quality people, were thrown a bone of a shameful world — they say you are now forbidden to call African Americans, and now you are „equal people“, you can complain about racism in gestures and words. And agents of bourgeois influence in every possible way inflate the hysteria of the offended and offended, thus reducing the problems of the African Americans population of the United States to nonsense like „Black Lives Matter“, leading it away from the class struggle in the wilds of racial demagogy.

And the „black president of America“, who did absolutely nothing for the African Americans population — what if this is not a manifestation of the imposed shameful world? Even Fidel Castro hoped for Obama’s skin color, which would make him a progressive president.

No matter how bourgeois ideologists disguise the problems of the US people under racial or party dilemmas, the split of American society takes place along the lines of class relations. As long as disgruntled African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and white proletarians, semi-proletarians, and lumpen are not aware of this, they will be pawns in the game of the oligarchy that pits them.

As long as the US African Americans movement does not realize that the cause of their plight is not racism in itself or even a racist government, but capitalism that does not allow them to get out of the swamp of poverty and wretchedness, it will exist in the form of periodic pogrom activity.

Racial and national discrimination, racial and national oppression are integral components of capitalism. No matter how beautiful laws are adopted, no matter what the cultural program for promoting equality is implemented, under capitalism there are always large sections of the most crushed and weak population that can be segregated by these signs. And capital most of all beats weak people, chews them and spits them out first of all as the cheapest and most disenfranchised labor.

In Russia, for example, there is no „racial issue“, it seems that small nations have their own national republics, they are not oppressed. But at the same time, segregation, oppression, humiliation exist and flourish. The capitalists brought several million Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Moldavians, Tajiks, Turkmens and Uzbeks into the country, and inspired the masses that they were all „churkas“, („chocks“ — trans.) „nerus“, („non-Russians“) second-rate-quality people. Although even yesterday, they were our brothers in the USSR, together we made up a single Soviet people, who heroically fought and created. In addition, all these peoples are completely different in their ethnic origin and culture, but they are deliberately thrown into a heap precisely because of their economic situation — they are „migrant workers“, cheap labor. And that means the most profitable human material for capital. And capital hits them, smothers, chews and spits out.

The heyday of the culture and life African Americans, Latinos and Asians, their release from the monstrous oppression of poverty and wretchedness is possible only after the elimination of capitalism in the United States. No separatism, no civil protest, no riots and pogroms will change anything. Only if a strong Marxist party emerges in the United States that can form an all-racial revolutionary class capable of rallying the masses around a program to overthrow the rule of capital can we talk about the real prospect of a complete and final solution to all interracial and interethnic issues. Especially in the current protests and pogroms involved a lot of Whites.

African Americans, Latinos and Asians should promote the brilliant success of the Leninist-Stalinist policy of creating a powerful Communist power, based on the friendship of peoples. And the material basis for the friendship of peoples can only be public ownership of the means of production.