Workers World Vol. 7, No. 17
New York, August 17 – Sam Marcy, chairman of Workers World Party, today hailed the rebellion of the Black People of Los Angeles as a genuine revolutionary upsurge and a sure sign of the coming Black emancipation. Condemning the L.A. police and counterrevolutionary National Guard, and calling for workers’ solidarity with the Black insurrection, he made the following statement in the name of the party:
“When people rise up and face machine guns with fists and side arms, they are telling the world that they are finished with the old system. They are ready to die rather than live in the old way any longer. The Watts insurrection proves that the struggle for Black emancipation has reached a new and higher level and its ultimate victory is certain.
“Workers World Party calls upon all friends of Black Freedom to rally to the cause of the embattled Black masses of Los Angeles, to condemn their oppressors and to avenge the murder of their comrades-in-arms. We denounce the imprisonment of 3,000 innocent people and demand their immediate release. Their imprisonment cannot be considered the punishment of criminals, but persecution of the victims of criminals – the criminals are the little landlords and bosses of Watts and the big landlords and bosses who make up the ruling class of the United States.
“Our party condemns the action of the California National Guard in reinforcing the already Cossack-like police under the notorious racist, Chief William H. Parker. Chief Parker’s statement of yesterday: “We are on top; they are on the bottom’ is the voice of the counterrevolution gloating over its victims.
“A few of the rich, it is true, have had kind words for their victims while their paid storm troopers were shooting them down. But this is nothing new. There was always a certain percentage of slave masters who shed crocodile tears while extracting the maximum sweat and blood from their slaves. Now the percentage is bigger, because the modern masters have to rule by deception as well as by machine guns. They have learned how to disguise the policeman’s club with the social worker’s crumbs and the sociologist’s lies.
“The newspapers have carefully emphasized that mere bystanders and other inoffensive people were hurt in the conflict. (How many thousand inoffensive persons have been lynched in the last 400 years?) It is of course regrettable that innocent persons were hurt, even though this happens in all wars and revolutions.
“But if the Black masses did not always pinpoint their real enemy in this uprising – and they did so far more often than the racist press admits – it is because the oppression is so extreme, the rage against racial and national indignity is so great. Imperialism always increases national oppression to the bursting point. And the bursting point was reached and passed in Los Angeles last week.
“The ruling class horror at the ‘looting’ in the Watts district would be comical if it were not so disgustingly hypocritical. No people have been more plundered of their labor, their lives, their nationhood and their very identity than the people now accused of ‘looting’ the trinkets which their oppressors have been selling them at scandalous prices for years. The real plunderers, whether slave-traders, sweatshop bosses, money lenders or merchants, always stand behind the police and the National Guard, always tell them to shoot in the name of ‘public order’ or ‘protection of women and children.’ The real plunderers, the looters of the ages, are the forces against which the Black uprising was directed in the first place.
“The Watts uprising was accompanied by looting and burning, to be sure. But when was any genuine popular upheaval free from these so-called ‘excesses’ of the masses? The Watts rebellion is like a hundred or more other rebellions that preceded great revolutions. Without previously prepared positions, without previously chosen commanders, without massive arms and long training – with only the desperate passion of a people provoked beyond endurance – men, women and children fought against machine guns and hardened troops in battle dress. They struck back with the only weapons available to them. They should be praised and honored for this, not castigated and sermonized.
“The hypocrisy of the ruling class, who pretend amazement at the event, is only equaled by the attitude of those treacherous leaders of the oppressed who hold up their hands in horror and condemn the very people who are being shot down for standing on their feet instead of their knees.
“The responsibility for every single killing in the Watts area last week lies squarely at the door of the U.S. ruling class. Any leader of the oppressed who denies this and calls for discipline or punishment of the people is no leader, but a tool of the oppressor himself. That goes double for the powerful labor bureaucracy which has turned its back upon Black labor and handed the bosses a lily-white whip with which to beat it down.
“Had the misleaders of labor done their duty in the past, the struggle would not be so difficult today, nor would the workers be so divided as to color.
“But the Black masses are determined to win freedom now, whatever the odds. And Workers World Party supports them without reservation.”
Last updated: 11 May 2026