CHICAGO, August 15 - Seven members from the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined hundreds of other angry workers and youth at a school on the city’s South Side to protest the liberal bosses’ plans for greater environmental racism and worker displacement. The event was a “Community over Quantum” Town Hall in the majority-Black South Shore neighborhood. For several months before the forum PLers came from across Indiana and Chicago to canvas the neighborhood with the community organization Southside Together, who organized the event and invited the mayor, Brandon Johnson.
The audience and the speakers were unanimous in demanding the mayor revoke the permits for the Quantum Shore Project, which is a massive high-tech research campus that will include military and surveillance purposes. Johnson insisted that the community needs to accept the Quantum Shore development to allow the capitalists to get something from their community. According to the bosses’ exploitative logic, only once the community gives the capitalists what they want, then there can be some progress on environmental racism, poverty, and violence. There always must be a transaction to get something in return.
Our Party must lead the working class to smash ruling class ideology so we can win class conscious fighters to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, a new state form where workers will decide collectively how to run things based on criticism, self-criticism and dialectical materialism (a philosophy that is the foundation for all communist revolutions). We won’t need to beg for crumbs!
Angry workers shout liberal misleader down
Under a hail of boos and hisses Mayor Johnson dipped out the back before the event was even over. He attempted to convince the audience they should trust him to represent “working people” in ongoing negotiations with developers when directly asked to kill the project by a presenter. Johnson can’t even say the words “working class.”
A PLP member on stage made the point that the bosses’ quantum center advocates claim their tool can solve problems like healthcare and climate change with new inventions. This comrade explained from personal experience as an EMT that his hospital on the west side of the city is full of working-class people suffering from preventable ailments unable to afford medicine that is already invented.
Only the working class can change history to stop climate change and cure disease. Machines (including computers) are not capable of this type of historical action on their own. When bosses control machines, they use them to dominate workers, building fascism and inter-imperialist war. Workers must take over the machines to liberate their productive forces to support life instead of death. This is the class basis of science.
Capitalism poisons the earth and workers while building for war
South Shore was the site of US Steel’s South Works, which once employed 20,000 workers. The works have been shut down since 1992, leaving a legacy of unemployment and environmental racism (steel production leaves behind heavy metals like lead, manganese, chromium as well as petroleum waste) (Hyde Park Herald, 7/3).
The town hall presenters were all lifelong working-class residents of the neighborhood, and many were from families of multiple generations of South Shore workers. For decades there has been poverty, filthy streets, decaying housing, unmet needs for medical care, including mental health care and care for respiratory problems related to pollution. Residents described new harms from the recent construction of the project, including hospitalizations for respiratory illnesses and appalling rent increases of $400 or more per month even as the neighborhood becomes less livable after losing its last grocery store.
Two of the speakers made the point that powerful public figures and institutions of the ruling class are aligned in support of this project. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, President Donald Trump, local construction firms, the Air Force Research Lab, the Department of Defense DARPA program, and academics from major universities organized under the umbrella Chicago Quantum Exchange all expressed public support and organized funds for the Quantum facility. DARPA-funded Project Maven, which uses AI to plan warfare, and has been used in Gaza to try to murder entire families at once for the genocide. Despite feigning horror at Trump’s research grant cuts, Pritzker, liberal scientists and the military brass can unite with Trump’s department of war to lavish funding on military technology preparing for war with China, the leading rival of U.S. imperialism.
Don’t negotiate with the bosses – make revolution!
It was a great step for the workers to publicly reject the Quantum project and to reject the mayor’s misleadership and false promises of a better life through negotiations with capitalists. Many speakers and community members suggested better alternatives for development: from mental health facilities to grocery stores with subsidized prices. However, we still need to do a better job in raising the PLP’s line. Capitalism is a total system of private ownership of socialized production that spans the earth, especially in its highest stage, imperialism.
Only by co-operating with the whole world’s international working class can we remake this system for the working class’s benefit. We need a revolution led by the PLP to defeat the capitalists who have stood in the way of this type of working-class cooperation since the Paris Commune. This struggle in the South Shore will only grow more intense as the ruling class and their lackeys attack the Black workers more aggressively. We must unite to fight alongside these workers to win them as a key part of the international fight for communist revolution. J
