Riots have broken out again in Black neighbourhoods in the United States, most recently in Ferguson and Baltimore, this time triggered by hasty killings by the police.

Recurring uprisings, which the party has always welcomed as healthy manifestations of class struggle and interpreted, from the standpoint of communism, as the ever-heroic, as natural as it is spontaneous, rebellion of the oppressed. Our reports and important assessments must be reread, which we cannot even summarise here, in opposition to those of all democrats: 1964, ‘Myths About American Democracy Crumble’; 1965, ‘Blacks’ Wrath Had the Rotten Pillars of Bourgeois and Democratic “Civilisation” Crumbling’; 1967, ‘Glory to the Rioting Black Proletarians’ and ‘Need for Revolutionary Theory and the Class Party in America’; 1968, ‘The True Way of the Black Proletariat’; 1971, ‘The Black Panther Movement’; 1980, ‘Black Proletarians Rioting in Florida’; 1992, ‘Revolt of Despair in the Tragic Absence of the Organised Working Class’.

We, observers from afar, have recognised in that hatred and in that spontaneous and collective manifestation of violence the true and sincere feelings of the proletarian class, of our class and, unconsciously, of the overwhelming need to destroy the current social, economic, and political order.

African-Americans constitute ‘a proletariat within the proletariat,’ that large reservoir of the industrial reserve army that must exist and does exist in every capitalist society and that is often identified with groups recognisable by race or culture: foreigners everywhere, Catholics in Ulster, Koreans in Japan, Caucasians in Russia, in an endless list.

Today it is ‘politically correct’ to say that races do not exist. They do exist, indeed, but for humans they are more than chromosomes: they are a historical product. ‘Blacks’ are those who – for other reasons, today predominantly dark skin – at a certain time and place occupy a certain position in society. Racism is therefore a problem of class and not of race. We have quoted: ‘the black person is not poor because he is black, but he is black because he is poor’. ‘Blacks’ are those who live in a certain neighbourhood. If a black person makes money, he becomes much whiter; if a white worker is fired, he becomes, immediately and over time, increasingly blacker.

This implacable caste-like subjugation is therefore not a remnant of pre-bourgeois societies, or the painful legacy of particular events in the past, such as the slave trade from Africa, nor does it arise from prejudice or cultural differences, but is one of the products of modern, grandiose, civilised, democratic and liberal capitalism.

It is civil equality among citizens of the same State, their legal equality and their full individual freedom that transforms them into a commodity. Every commodity has its value and its price on the market. And the price of the labour of those who are disadvantaged, who speak a rudimentary language, who have not been able to study at prestigious schools, who were born in a poor neighbourhood, who have the wrong skin colour, who come from a family of a different religion, etc., will inevitably be lower.

Racism is therefore inseparable from capitalism and spreads and intensifies alongside it. Furthermore it is fuelled by the ruling class to divide the exploited, and it also takes hold among white workers (whom in America, not coincidentally, they call the ‘middle class’), who blame their most vulnerable comrades for existing, for competing in the labour market and for driving wages down.

The granting of ‘civil rights’ by the bourgeoisie will therefore never resolve the subjugation of the working class, and particularly those who are worst paid and treated. Equality of all workers under the law, which is certainly something to be demanded when it is absent, and which the bourgeoisie does not grant spontaneously: it did so with Black Americans only when forced to do so by street protests, and even today, in Europe for example, it does not grant it to immigrant workers, harassed in a thousand ways and kept in a state of continuous inferiority and blackmail.

The United States is a country with a flourishing and fully established capitalism, and that has dominated the entire world for a century with its economic and military power. It has been able to become rich and powerful precisely because the conditions of its working class are miserable: low wages, some of the longest working hours in the world, and an almost total lack of social benefits, healthcare, schools, pensions, disability. Permanent and absolute insecurity is elevated to an ideal and a social model.

From these levels of widespread and general precariousness among the working class, one need only descend one step to find oneself in conditions of absolute pauperism and abandonment among the lower strata of the proletariat. There are currently 114,000 homeless people in California, most of whom are former workers, 80,000 in New York, 41,000 in Florida, 28,000 in Texas, 21,000 in Massachusetts. 23% of these are children and young people under the age of 18. In many states, ‘vagrancy’, or sleeping in a car, is a crime punishable by imprisonment. In Baltimore, in the neighbourhood known as ‘Little Italy’, infant mortality is the worst in the entire Western world, life expectancy is lower than retirement age, and people die 19 years earlier than in the rich neighbourhoods of the same city; 41% of the inhabitants are defined as indigent.

Under these conditions, the only chance of survival for many young people is petty crime, mostly drug dealing and petty theft. One in three black people will be imprisoned at least once in their lifetime, one in ten Latin Americans, and one in 17 white people. Over 2 million are incarcerated: no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its citizens, one and a half million more than China, which has a population five times larger (California Prison Focus). Certainly a cost-effective way to house and control the unemployed.

In growing numbers, prisoners are forced to work for next to nothing in factories relocated inside prisons: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq. The revenues of just two large private prison companies amount to billion a year. Legislation has been changed to allow long prison sentences for even minor offences, and police officers and judges are working hard to arrest and sentence indiscriminately. It is understandable why a black person stopped by the police would risk his life to escape.

Capitalism will never succeed in emancipating itself from its opposite: slavery.

When not in prison, poor black people are kept locked up in ghettos by constant pressure from the police, who have complete freedom to beat, arrest, and kill.

We therefore view the riots in black neighbourhoods as episodes in the ongoing civil war between the ruling bourgeoisie and the working class, and as proof of the impotence of the capitalist mode of production both in maintaining its slaves and in obtaining their peaceful submission.

But those who courageously clash with the armed bourgeois forces are only small and peripheral sections of the class, an isolated minority and prisoner in the ghettos. The other is equally imprisoned, materially and spiritually, in the ghettos for white proletarians. And the bourgeois State, against a few young people armed only with stones and bottles, can concentrate its forces, from thousands of men of the National Guard up to the army, impose a curfew and threaten martial law. The horizon of those who fight remains the neighbourhood, if not the single street, lacking an organisation to unify them and hope for a different world; so much so that their resentment is directed at individual police officers, whose punishment is sought in the courts of the State that arms them.

Just as the ruling class prepares for this general war, of which it is fully aware of the impending threat, and increasingly strengthens its armed forces, recently equipped also with machine guns and armoured vehicles, so the working class must, starting almost from scratch today, rebuild its class organisational fabric, consisting first and foremost of trade unions aimed at defending its immediate living conditions, trade unions that unite workers of all races in organisation, demands, and strikes. These trade unions will also take on board the needs and demands of unemployed comrades.

Furthermore, today in the USA, the only moral leaders and recognised representatives of the ‘communities’ are the pastors of the countless churches, all certainly controlled by the State, who on principle reject violence ‘from both sides’ and thus confirm the status quo. Another ideal is lacking, a higher class consciousness that unifies the workers of America and the world: this perspective, which history imposes, can only be that of communism and the Communist Party, the conscious expression of class hatred and scientific demonstration of its strength and destiny.

And this in America and throughout the world.