We will remember Claude
This letter marks the one-year angelversary of 17-year-old Claude, a former student killed in these capitalist Brooklyn streets. It also marks our year-long fight to keep his memory alive in the face of multiple memorial tear-downs by the school administration. The Black administration has time and time again proven to fear mainly-Black students’ class-consciousness. This time, they stayed surprisingly quiet.
Claude’s cohort graduated, and with them, much of his memory. A school with a high staff turnaround also means only about six teachers remember him. (See the 2023 CHALLENGEs 4/12, 4/26, and 11/29 for the full backstory.) So it was important to the young student organizers—who didn’t know Claude personally but through the struggle have grown to befriend him in death—keep Claude’s memory alive. They wanted to make it clear that Claude’s life mattered. Borrowing from our comrades fighting for justice for Alex Flores in Los Angeles, we decided to mark the day as Claude’s “angel-versary.”
The student organizers used their lunch period to spread Claude’s story. They asked a friend to bring in her special markers, so they can draw hand and arm tattoos of Claude’s name. They also distributed hundreds of stickers that read, “we will remember Claude” and “I am Claude.” It had me teary-eyed seeing so many 9th graders in the hallway with the stickers on their chest, arms, socks, and even faces. Many staff members also wore the stickers.
Many of the new and younger students know Claude as “the kid on the teacher’s desk” and from the poem Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (Communist magazine Liberator in 1919) posted in the class. Last year, we teachers organized to have a personal memorial of Claude in our classrooms. Four rooms have kept this tradition. It was an opportunity to share stories of Claude as well as to have conversations about how remembering can be an act of defiance in a society where erasure is a tool of capitalist oppression. If we forget and become passive, the more power the rulers have. Memory brings with it working-class rage, and if organized, working-class rebellion.
You know, how the ruling-class tried to bury Claude is similar to how that same ruling class tried to bury the memory of 14,500 Palestinian children murdered by U.S.-Israel warmongers. By fighting to remember, we are also fighting to never let the rulers forget what they did. To borrow from the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos and the 2014 Ayotzinapa struggle, “they tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” From Gaza to Brooklyn, we hope to plant seeds of fightback.
While we don’t know why the administration ignored this student action, we do know that actions such as these help build confidence in our class. The next step is to show these courageous students that they are not alone in their search for a just world. What better way than May Day?
*The pseudonym Claude is inspired by the Black communist fighter-writer, Claude Mckay.
*****
555th West Struggle: Yes to optimism, no to one-sidedness
The CHALLENGE article about West Wednesday #555 is excellent! The only criticism I’d make is that - in this comrade’s judgment - it somewhat exaggerates the strength of revolutionary politics within the West Coalition. For example, though the article does, to some extent, point out the opposite side later on, one of the introductory sentences says, “This makes 555 Wednesdays where the coalition has tirelessly dedicated to calling out the fake liberal bosses and their politrickans…”
True. However, for example, there is still a soft spot - among organizersin West Wednesday - for Baltimore City Council member Ryan Dorsey who, at first, seemed to support our vigorous push to stop Worley from becoming Baltimore’s new police commissioner. Worthless Worley is the former head of Northeast District, and an enabler of the killer cops under his command who stole Tyrone West’s life, brutalized others, and who have since been promoted.
Though Ryan Dorsey stabbed us in the back at the last minute, during that effort to stop Worley’s confirmation, there are nevertheless some ongoing expectations - within the West Coalition - that Dorsey’s liberalism will be helpful down the road.
Additionally, a leading voice - at the weekly West Wednesday rallies and livestreams - has expressed some mixed feelings: on the one hand criticizing Maryland’s legislative process for never stopping brutality against Black workers for 400 years but, on the other hand, sometimes voicing an expectation that the legislature is where we will one day get significant justice.
There is also a certain level of commitment to pacifism, among West Wednesday organizers, even though, as history has shown us, the defeat of slavery necessitated the Civil War. Similarly today, it’s unrealistic to expect that the flower of egalitarian communism can burst from the manure of capitalism without revolution.
Someone in another city reading the article might get the impression that organizersin the West Coalition embrace the Party’s ideas, and that nothing’s holding them back from joining Progressive Labor Party. That’s not the situation.
Yes, in CHALLENGE we need to uphold revolutionary optimism (which the article does excellently!) but we also need to always be objective, not one-sided. We need to always give people a full understanding of the real situation.
*****
The Old Oak movie a condemnation to capitalist inequality
My wife and I and two comrades went to see the latest Ken Loach film, The Old Oak. It’s set a few years ago in a small town in northern England, the de-industrialized, impoverished region of the country where children are malnourished and where wealthy outside investors buy up property at bargain prices, depreciating the value of the homes of local residents. Into this cauldron of social misery come a few families of Syrian refugees fleeing the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad. Some of the locals resent the newcomers and are unwelcoming, while others offer assistance and the tension between the two groups mounts.
The film is well-acted and beautifully shot. The director offers a politics of “solidarity, not charity,” in which working class folks with little means but with a memory of the days of fierce class struggle, when miners went on strike and stood shoulder to shoulder for months against Prime Minister Thatcher and the police, extend assistance to people who are coming from the Syrian war zone.
The two main characters are Tommy Joe Ballantyne (who owns the local pub and whose deceased father was a leftist miner) and Yara, a Syrian refugee who learned English while working for two years in refugee camps. The two of them bond and stand up to the local racists who want the refugees to leave. Though Loach clearly disapproves of their nativist views, he provides a materialist explanation for them: the refugees provide a scapegoat for the raw deal that capitalism has handed them. Rather than understand and blame the class system, they foolishly blame workers from other countries who are in worse shape. Sound familiar?
Embracing the old miner’s adage of “those who eat together stick together”, Tommy, Yara and dozens of others plan a dinner that will bring together the Syrian and local families in the back room of the pub. Yara uses her camera to take pictures depicting the dignity and humanity of the townspeople. Loach is realistic enough to know that not everyone will be won over; the racists hit back. Nevertheless, The Old Oak remains optimistic that working class solidarity will ultimately win out over division.
Although the terms “capitalism” and “revolution” are never used, which is a weakness, the film is a powerful condemnation of the inequality and immiseration of capitalism, both in Britain and in Syria. It promotes solidarity based on common life experiences and interests, and we should organize many of our friends and co-workers to see The Old Oak and then march on May Day.
*****
Poem:
“IF I MUST DIE”
BY REFAAT ALAREER
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
