Police violence, "racial profiling" and racist harassment, the skyrocketing imprisonment of now more than 2 million working people, and executions--whether by cops on the streets, in prisons, or through state-sanctioned murder--are part of a seamless pattern of violence against working people in this country. Bringing to Washington our demands for an end to this brutality puts the responsibility exactly where it should be: on the Democratic and Republican parties, who act in the interests of the super-wealthy rulers of this country.

I am traveling to the march with fighters from Valdosta, Georgia. They have been waging a struggle for justice for Willie Williams, found dead in his jail cell one day after being arrested by deputies of the Lowndes County sheriff's department. Others are coming to the march from New York City, where tens of thousands, through their continual mobilizations, put the question of police brutality at the center of politics in the city and dealt blows to the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Participants include many from St. Louis, where recent actions condemned the police killings of Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley.

The violence and racism that permeate every institution of capitalist society in the United States is not accidental or the result of a few bad apples or misguided policies. They are part of the necessary workings of a system that defends the prerogatives, power, and interests of an imperialist ruling class, one that extends its brutality at home to workers and farmers worldwide.

Violence, racism, national oppression, and exploitation are what the capitalist rulers have to offer. They can find no way out of the crisis of their system other than to attack, assault, and attempt to pacify those who create all the wealth in society and who hold tremendous social and economic power in their own hands: working people.

The extent of this violence cannot be understated. Thousands of working people are executed by a policeman's bullet, chokehold, or hog-tying. An unofficial survey of local newspapers puts deaths at the hands of police and prison guards between 1990 and the opening of 1998 at 2,000--clearly just the tip of the iceberg. During that same period, 312 people across the United States were killed in prison death chambers.

Both Albert Gore and George W. Bush are champions of these weapons of class terror, calling for more cops, restricted rights of appeal and parole, and stiffer penalties, including capital punishment. The Clinton-Gore administration put in place the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which made some 60 additional federal offenses punishable by death, and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which further restricts federal court appeal rights of those in state prisons.

For his part, Bush has presided over 136 prisonhouse state killings during his five years as governor--fully one-fifth of all those in the United States since 1976. A shroud of silence prevents an accounting of how many more working people were killed in that state during those years by Texas Rangers, local police, la migra, sheriffs and their deputies, and rightist thugs--often including the former list in civilian clothes.

State-sanctioned, or state-encouraged, murders on the streets and in the prisons combined, however, still fall far short of the numbers of workers killed each year as a result of the employers' profit-driven speedup, brutal intensification of labor, and lengthening of hours. Both life and limb of workers in the United States are being sacrificed on the altar of sharpening competition for markets among U.S. capitalists, and between them and their rivals worldwide.

The march in Washington, strikes by coal miners and telephone workers, union organizing struggles by meat packers, rallies to demand equal rights for immigrants, and other protests and actions by working people point in the opposite direction from what the capitalist rulers and the Democratic and Republican parties are driving us toward.

These struggles point to a world where human solidarity and social progress are primary, where the needs and interests of working people come first. The Socialist Workers campaign points to the possibilities and necessity of mounting a revolutionary struggle by tens of millions in order to replace the government of the capitalist minority with one of the majority, workers and farmers. Such a government would make it possible to begin to transform the dog-eat-dog society of capitalism, with all its inherent brutalities, into one where the creativity, productive capacities, and human solidarity of working people can open a new era of social progress, not only in the United States but worldwide.

Margaret Trowe and I urge you to join with us and the Young Socialists in this campaign and in every instance where fellow working people take the road of resistance and struggle.