First Published: The People’s Tribune, Vol. 3, No. 9, October 1971.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Fascism is murder! On September 13, over one thousand armed guards and state police using helicopters, machine guns, tanks and gas, murdered at least 32 prisoners in Attica State Prison, New York, and seriously wounded many more. The striking prisoners (over 80% Negro and Puerto Rican minorities) and all oppressed and exploited workers in this country were shown once again how the imperialists meet revolutionary demands with fascist terror. The war of extermination that the U.S imperialists have carried out in Vietnam is coming home.
It is becoming very clear that the imperialists will stop at nothing to contain the spreading revolutionary movement. Look at how these butchers used the hostages to whip up public opinion against the striking prisoners and then brazenly murdered at least 10 of their own men! How is the brutal murder of at least 42 persons at Attica different from the mass slaughters at the hands of Hitler’s army? How is this different from the infamous extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto? Qualitatively there is no difference!
Prisons are changing rapidly as the contradictions within the U.S. state sharpen. No longer a place to lock up the dregs of society, or “rehabilitation centers”, they are now Hitler type concentration camps for thousands of poor and oppressed workers and for the national minorities in particular. Prisons are not used to stop crime, but are now being used solely to stop revolution a direct arm of the rising fascist state. But the growing revolutionary struggle in the prison system is proof that the U.S, workers are and will fight against rising fascism. The struggle at Attica and in prisons through out the U.S. is a revolutionary struggle and we fully support and encourage its growth.
To aid in their drive to crush the revolutionary upsurge especially of the black national minority and in the Negro Nation, the fascists have revived the Ku Klux Klan. In Jacksonville, Florida the Klan attempted to bomb a bus carrying school children. In Lubbock, Texas, Klan and police shot a black youngster to death because he entered an integrated school. In Detroit, Michigan, the Klan attempted to blow up 20 school buses and were not held by police. In Butler, Alabama, a black teenager, Margaret Ann Knott, was murdered by fascists during a peaceful demonstration by the black population.
In Puerto Rico, the whole nation was put under open military rule to protect the Yankee Governor’s conference held there. In spite of this, over 25,000 people demonstrated against U.S. imperialism.
The open fascist moves by the U.S. imperialists directed at the Negro Nation, Puerto Rico, and the national minorities are the first step toward building a fascist dictatorship. The majority of the U.S. workers are feeling the beginning of these attacks with high taxes, a freeze on wages and no strike laws, while prices skyrocket and there is mass unemployment. But when it is necessary, the fascists will not hesitate to spread the terror they are now perfecting in Attica, San Quentin, San Juan, and the Negro Nation and the Southwest.
Behind all these attacks is the fact that the capitalist system is dying. Either workers must overthrow this rotten system and establish socialism led by the dictatorship of the proletariat, or face another generation of continued war and oppression.
The fascists’ attack must be stopped where it starts. Every decent working class person has to actively fight for the rights of the minorities and for the independence of the Negro Nation and Puerto Rico! We must take to heart the heroic stand of the Attica revolutionaries and join in the fight against fascism.
How can we do this? We firmly believe that our main task now is to build a communist party, capable of uniting the growing resistance against U.S. imperialism with the revolutionary theory Marxism-Leninism, capable organizing the fight to the finish against the most chauvinistic and reactionary class of imperialist rulers the world has ever seen. We urge all revolutionary minded workers to join us and fight for the rights of working and oppressed people of the world!