AMERICA has erupted this week as the working class and youth have responded to the continued and unending violence meted out to them on a daily basis by the capitalist state and its armed agencies.
On Thursday, a demonstration in Dallas, Texas, by the Black Lives Matter movement saw five police officers shot dead and a further six wounded as the hatred of the police and its murderous campaign against black workers and youth exploded in violence.
The immediate cause of the demonstration and those that took place across the country was the killing of Anton Sterling in Louisiana on July 4, followed the next day by the killing of Philando Castile who was shot four times after being stopped in his car for having a broken tail light.
These two killings of black workers, neither of whom posed a threat to the police, are not unique.
Last year, the Guardian newspaper calculated that 1,136 civilians had been killed in 2015 (no official records are kept) while over 500 have been killed this year already. The vast majority of those killed were black as the capitalist state steps up its campaign of violence in an attempt to assert its authority through intimidation and murder.
The killing of the black teenager Michael Brown in August 2014 by a white police officer (his bleeding corpse was left uncovered in the middle of a street for four hours, doubtless as a warning to other youths) caused a storm of outrage which led to the formation of the Black Lives Matter campaign which swept the country and linked up with an equally burgeoning campaign of low-paid workers demanding a living wage of $15 an hour minimum.
The latest clash in Dallas proves conclusively that the US working class and the oppressed minorities, far from being intimidated, have had enough of a bankrupt system that wages a murderous war against them and their families.
Violence has not been confined to the gunning down of innocent people by the police, since a war has been systematically waged against tens of millions of US workers through attacks on their wages and jobs ever since the banking collapse of 2008.
Workers have had enough and are rising up and fighting back. They are fighting back on the streets and by delivering huge blows to the bourgeois political parties that insisted that workers pay for the bank crisis with the destruction of their jobs, homes and living standards.
The overwhelming support that the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders gained from workers, young people and the organised US trade union movement demonstrated conclusively that the working class is breaking from the Democrats and moving towards socialism, and a socialist revolution, under the impact of the crisis and the growing realisation that capitalism holds no future for them.
This has produced the conditions for rapidly building a US Labor Party to represent working class interests, which will be based on the trade unions and all of the oppressed sections of US society. This Labor Party will have at its left wing the US section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to fight for the way forward to the American socialist revolution.
The extreme economic and political violence meted out to workers in America is replicated across the world and is producing revolutionary uprisings against the established order everywhere.
In France, millions of workers and youth are daily battling it out with the riot police as they confront a ‘socialist’ government intent on destroying their historic rights in the name of EU capitalist austerity.
Here in Britain, the working class delivered a mighty blow to the ruling class when they rejected the demands of both the Tory government and the Labour Party and trade union leaders, and refused to be intimidated by the bankers into voting to remain in the EU.
Voting down the capitalist establishment has created a huge political and economic crisis for the bourgeoisie, with the working class rapidly coming to the conclusion that bankrupt capitalism cannot be allowed to stagger on and must be put down and replaced with socialism.
With America and Europe on the revolutionary road, the burning issue is the building of parties of the Fourth International in every country to lead the working class to power through the victory of the world socialist revolution. This is the immediate task before every worker and young person today.
