Students choose fightback over attendance
Ever since the start of this school year, we all have been no strangers to low attendance rates, social distance protocols, and inconsistent schedules. Despite all shortcomings, everyone in the building pulled themselves through a strange year. Right before the winter break, everything was just like the last time schools went remote. The classrooms were practically empty and confirmed Covid-19 cases within the school were rising at an alarming rate. However, a few days after the New Year, we came back to a lack of change. Nothing to protect the school from the new variant.
I understand why the city, the school faculty, and even some students would prefer to remain in person. But we remain open despite it being detrimental to the health of everyone in the building. A majority of my classmates and teachers have fallen ill from the virus. Classes lack substitute teachers as the school is too understaffed to replace the ones who are in quarantine. The length of this pandemic compounded with the lack of agency the students felt really brought a sense of hopelessness over the student body. The student walkout was a result of our pent up feelings.
On the day of the walkout, I remember asking the students who weren’t planning to participate in the event why. Why did they choose to stay? The responses generally fell under not wanting to miss a test or being wary of a teacher’s disapproval. I understand why they made such a decision. After all, it is also the same reason why I am writing this letter anonymously. But why do we need to use acts of civil disobedience just to get our voices out there? We shouldn’t need to put our education and futures on the line just to be heard. We are more than our attendance records and acceptance letters, damn it, but when are we going to act like it?
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CHALLENGE in the classroom
After a difficult and chaotic return to in-person school last week, I was excited to share the last CHALLENGE editorial, “Criminal Rulers Mandate Profit Over Workers Health.” In one of the classes I teach, my students responded well to the article and it led to a series of good class discussions over three days.
We started off by talking about the ways in which racism and inequality (frequent topics in our class) were making the current Omicron variant worse. Students were quick to recall the ways in which Covid-19 has disproportionately hit Black and Latin workers harder.
Next we dove into the article. The discussion questions provided on PLP.org (Progressive Labor Party) provided a helpful guide to our conversations over the next few days. Since ours is a bilingual class, we read the Spanish version with the English provided for reference as needed. On day one, we got through the first section and discussed “Why is the focus on the pandemic’s impact on the international working class [in all countries] important?”
The next day, we used the memes and social media posts about the CDC (from page 5 of the same issue) to reopen our discussion. The idea that the CDC was simply paid by the bosses to push workers back to work after five days was no surprise but still upsetting to students. And the fact that students are still being told to stay home 10 days after a positive test made it clear this action was about preserving profits not protecting lives.
Finally, we ended by discussing a student walkout against unsafe Covid-19 conditions that had affected many schools (but not ours). Some students had heard about the walkout on TV and expressed that they would like to have participated. This connected to us talking about the sway of ideas about personal freedom or wants instead of collective needs. When asked why they or others act this way, students responded with constructive criticisms/self-criticisms such as: “We are conditioned to be that way,” “I was taught not to care only about myself, but it is a struggle,” and “Selfishness is like a disease.”
Thanks CHALLENGE for helping to provide such useful teaching resources to foster a more revolutionary and collective classroom. Next steps: invite certain students to a study group outside of school and read excerpts of “Smash Racism: A Fighter’s Manual” with the whole class.
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MTA bosses guilty for subway death
A young Latin worker recently lost his life in an accident, while attempting to “jump” the turnstiles in a subway station in Queens. The bosses’ media has shared gruesome surveillance video of the incident, which has also gone viral. While he was apparently intoxicated at the time, several comments online are suggesting he deserved it for “fare-beating.”
Ohio politician (and fascism apologist) Jim Trakas, for example, disgustingly wrote in response to a New York Post Tweet about the story, “The Darwin Awards claims its first victor of 2022. He died doing what he loved-stealing from others.”
These comments (and plenty more that need not be repeated here) show how the bosses work overtime to convince workers that other workers are the real thieves, and that they are responsible for the subway being in such horrible shape.
It goes along with the refrain that “If they can afford to have [insert fancy item here], they can afford the $2.75 to ride the train.”
The reality is that the racist MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) bosses are $35 billion in debt to their Wall Street overlords (AMNY, 10/13/20). That’s why they need to keep cutting service to many working-class neighborhoods. Less money to hire workers and more money for the Wall Street finance capitalists. So even if every single person paid the fare, it wouldn’t put a dent in improving anything.
But of course, the ruling class needs to create boogeymen to blame for its shortfalls (see page 2). What better way for them to do that than by pitting workers against one another?
Also, many workers have a hard time paying the fare and balancing other critical financial responsibilities in their lives. While the city has a fare program in place to supposedly help these people, former Mayor Bill DeBlasio cut $65 million from the program in 2020, using reduced pandemic ridership as an excuse. (StreetsBlogNYC, 6/30/20)
These cuts left so-called “essential” workers, who couldn’t work from home, struggling to pay their way to their jobs. Many of them are Black and Latin, as racism once again rears its ugly head.
The subway, just like hospitals and fire departments, provides an essential service for millions of workers in the city, whose taxes already pay for the trains and buses. It’s not workers fault that money goes towards imperialist war, leaving our infrastructure to rot.
No worker deserves to die just because they did not pay a fare to use the trains! Public transit should be completely free. Under a communist world, that would be a reality, One that can’t come soon enough.
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Red on radio exposes democracy
I gave the following statement on the Rick Smith labor talk show on WBAI radio airing Saturdays at 6pm.
“Hi Rick, I’d like to give an historical perspective to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. All Democrats and Republicans say they want to save democracy, a system that originated in the Greek Empire that featured a ratio of 40 slaves for every free man. Following the example of Greek democracy, the Constitution gave voting power only to slave and property owners and capitalists while restricting workers, slaves, women, indigenous people and immigrants from voting. U.S. history includes hundreds of racist insurrections to crush the Black working class and prevent racial unity. Whole communities were burned to the ground.
The Democrats represent the U.S. Empire of finance capitalists and imperialists who profit from endless wars that consume the majority of our taxes. The Republicans represent America First domestic capitalists who don’t want to support the U.S. Empire’s tax costs. They have allied with the racist insurrectionists who were made up of over 50 percent business owners and 10 percent military dedicated to take back their country and restore white supremacy.
The 20 million protestors of all races who marched against police murders and for equality last year have no stake in the capitalist’s fight for power. The growing wave of national and international strikes and rebellions are the worldwide voices of a rising working class, capable of forming a worker’s party to end capitalist racist inequality and endless wars. All history is of class struggle and workers today must decide which side they’re on.”
The whole statement was allowed on the air and the host referred to it several times during the remainder of the program. The reason is there is an audience for many of these ideas.
*****
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Criminal rulers mandate profit over workers’ health
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- 09 January 2022 506 hits
Alabama winter project Ignite sparks of fightback and revolution
click image to read the letterTUSCALOOSA COUNTY, Alabama, December 21— A multiracial and multi-gender group of educators, students, cultural workers and members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) returned to Alabama to support the ongoing Warrior Met miners’ strike. 1,100 multiracial miners have been on strike since last April 1, against Warrior Met Coal and its largest shareholder, Wall Street investment firm BlackRock, and the bosses’ attacks are intensifying on every level. The miners’ militant picket lines and efforts to block the scabs have been banned by the capitalists’ courts since October 28 as the bosses attempt to starve out the strike and destroy morale. The strike has shown once again that the bosses will always try to take back what we have won in the past. Only a communist society won through revolution can liberate us from this daily struggle to survive under capitalism.
Even with the picket lines banned, we still put our line on the line this week and brought our communist ideas of internationalist working class collectivity and revolutionary antiracist multiracial unity to miners, their families, and the Women’s Auxiliary.
The efforts of the Auxiliary have been integral in keeping the miners’ families fed and morale and solidarity high. In so many ways the miners and their families demonstrate why multiracial unity is such a mortal threat to capitalism, and why Black workers and industrial workers will lead our class to the ultimate victory of communist revolution!
Multiracial solidarity, comradely struggle
Following up on previous trips to Alabama throughout the fall, we were warmly invited to put our solidarity in action during this trip to help the UMWA Women's Auxiliary fill grocery bags with much-needed food for the miners’ families. We learned about the crucial importance of the donations to the UMWA Strike Pantry and how welcomed letters of support have been.
We also learned how proud the miners in this local District 20 are for being historically multiracial. Black and white miners and their families understood their rank-and-file multiracial unity has
been, and is, one of the greatest strengths of this strike. Throughout the week, sharp, comradely discussions were held ranging from communism to the strategy and tactics of the strike.
Miners dig in, teach us how it’s done
During meetings about the strike strategy and reform, struggle points and counterpoints were raised and heard throughout days of discussion. Disagreements remain, however, particularly over how to approach the passive “wait and see” legal strategy of union misleadership versus the seething desire for militancy among the rank-and-file.
As the miners and their families respected our efforts and our politics, we also gained deeper respect and admiration for their daily struggle to last “one day longer.” As one worker put it, “many of these guys are just getting used to the idea that neither [Donald] Trump nor [Joe] Biden is gonna save us. Until a few months ago they never met a communist or knew what one was. Now they talk about communism and capitalism. That’s a big deal. And y’all should remember this is a long-term process and a long-term fight.”
During our trip, miners and their families would ask us, “what is communism?” As one of our comrades answered, it’s a world where workers like us run the entire world for workers like us, without money or borders. It takes communist revolution to put our class in power.
Liberal bosses no friend of the working class
One of PLP’s important ideas, the dangers of liberal bosses, is playing out for all to see. With the miners fighting the bosses and the court injunctions, the International President of UMWA should be attacking West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, notoriously in the pocket of the coal bosses.
Instead, the UMWA president is appealing to Manchin to join with the rest of the Big Fascists in the U.S. ruling class and to support Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan to rebuild U.S. imperialism. Our class cannot rely on the liberal bosses. We must fight to win what we can from the bosses in the short term while also preparing our entire class for a communist revolution by building an international PLP. We can't lose sight of either goal.
Communism now!
Winning the strike would be a victory against BlackRock and the U.S. capitalist class. Win or lose the strike, however, recruiting miners like those at Warrior Met and industrial workers to help lead PLP and the entire international working class to communist revolution will be a stunning victory for the international working class.
Through the strike and our Party’s participation in the struggle a new comrade has joined PLP and miners, families and friends are interested in a PL study group. There is a renewed determination and commitment from every comrade as we prepare for May Day 2022. JOIN US!
NEWARK, NJ - A multiracial group of over 25 workers rallied in downtown Newark to call for the immediate release of Justin Rodwell and to get the charges dropped against the Rodwell/Spivey brothers. Since June 2021, the Newark Police Department (NPD) has stalked, harassed, terrorized, and arrested members of the Rodwell/Spivey family, after undercover police illegally and brutally stopped and frisked one of their family members and the Rodwell/Spivey brothers and their neighbors bravely stepped in.
For nearly seven months now Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and our class brothers and sisters have been fighting back in Newark until justice for the Rodwell/Spivey family and workers internationally is served. In the end only a communist revolution can truly break our chains, but until then rallies like the one we organized spread PLP’s revolutionary ideas to workers. They also develop new working class leaders and strengthen our confidence in the working class to build a mass communist movement instead of depending on politicians, like Newark’s racist mayor Ras Baraka, to pass weak liberal reforms.
Rally highlights fightback vs liberal reforms.
Ms. Rodwell, alongside her son and PLP members, stood in downtown Newark, some wearing T-shirts saying ‘Free Justin, Smash Racist Terror’ while others carried banners and posters raging against the racist judicial system.
The rally called for the immediate release of Justin, but also described the essential role of police terror on Black workers and the need for multi-racial unity to fight back. One speaker recalled stories about workers being harassed and robbed by the Newark Police Department. “That is why we are here. Because we need to fight back and we believe that we can fight to win this case…We are also out here to fight for a better world for Black people, Latin people, all [working class] people. Fight for a communist world.”
Ms. Rodwell got the attention of downtown shoppers as she recounted the attack on her sons. She promoted working class unity, "When I’m out here standing up for my sons’ rights, I’m also standing up for y’all rights and everybody’s rights.” This analysis came after weeks of organizing and talking to workers throughout Newark.
Depend on the working class - Not the politicians
Another speaker connected the struggle to the anti-homeless legislation pushed by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. Liberal misleader Baraka is demanding a permit, at-a-cost, from those feeding the homeless while spreading falsehoods of people tainting food with Fentanyl. A disgusting attempt to demonize homeless workers, and an attack on working class solidarity. It is also a ploy by Baraka’s administration to appease developers who continue to gentrify Newark and kick out the homeless. Politicians will never have the interests of the working class at heart.
By organizing and fighting back we build confidence in the working class. That’s what we did for weeks before the rally. We went to neighborhoods all across Newark. We distributed flyers, made contacts, and heard stories from workers about their experiences with the Newark Police Department and Essex County Sheriff’s Officers. Ms. Rodwell told PLP members after leafleting, “A lot of people told me they will come out, but they don’t show up. You all … came to me and said let’s go.” She gave us credit for our organizing efforts, but it was her leadership that has developed during this period. She is a respected leader in many neighborhoods. Workers approached her to give her hugs and their contact information. One woman took extra flyers to pass out at a hair salon.
Her leadership is also flourishing in the defense committee. After high Covid-19 numbers and fights within the local jail, she proposed going to meet other workers who have family and friends locked up in the same facility as Justin. This strengthened the morale of the support team and also helped get pages of contact information. Through this struggle we gain confidence in each other and see the potential for a communist world, run by the working class.
Liberal reforms are traps for workers
At the rally a Mayoral candidate promoted getting subpoena power for the Newark Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) and voting for politicians who can make the “police work for us because they are needed.”
These liberal reforms still have a strong hold on the working class. Liberal groups in Newark like the People’s Organization for Progress and the Newark NAACP push for the CCRB. It’s their solution to racist police terror. It’s also one of the initiatives of Baraka. Some liberal finance capitalists (Big Fascists, see Glossary, p. 6), see these review boards as an alternative to antiracist fightback. It’s a way to drain working class energy and anger through this bureaucratic ploy. It also promotes the idea that the police can serve the working class. It’s an illusion. From Colombia to Nigeria, the police have always been tools of the capitalist ruling class. A civilian review board may change the appearance of policing, but it will never change the essence of policing.
Working class needs revolutionary antiracist leaders
The ruling class puts in overtime trying to convince workers to support politicians and their liberal reforms. At best it gives workers some crumbs while we starve. This struggle is not only exposing many of these liberal misleaders but also builds working class fighters like Ms. Rodwell - something the bosses fear.
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Collectivity must win over competition Student athletes lead in fight against racism
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- 09 January 2022 563 hits
BROOKLYN, NY, December 15–In the ongoing struggle to make antiracism primary in the varsity sports at the multi-school John Jay Campus, students took the lead in a virtual forum that drew nearly 100 participants. Organized by parents, teachers, and students, the forum—“Are We One?”—gave students an opportunity to push adults on campus, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), to be self-critical about the athletic program’s integration efforts, which have disappointed a number of Black and Latin student athletes. In their drive to improve those efforts, the students also demanded that antiracism and collectivity—not wins and losses—should be the main measures of a successful season for a sports team.
The leadership of Black youth—the ones most brutally targeted by this racist system–continues to be central to this process. Building antiracist, integrated teams on and off the court is one way to crack the racist divisions that are normalized by the Department of Education (DoE) and the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL).
Under capitalism, competition is so commonplace that we rarely notice its harmfulness. It fosters selfish individualism and undermines class solidarity. Communists fight for a world where all workers can reach their full potential in body and mind.
Multiracial unity vs. elitism
Armed with a proud history of fightback, the John Jay girls’ volleyball team has been at the crux of the struggle against the racist opportunity gap in youth sports. If anything, these tensions have intensified during the pandemic. In the 2020-2021 school year, most public high school students in New York attended school virtually, and varsity sports programs were suspended. Many of the Black and Latin athletes who’d played on the successful John Jay girls volleyball team the year before had no way to practice or develop their skills. Then, in the fall of 2021, the PSAL integrated a fourth campus school into the John Jay athletic program: the elitist Millennium Brooklyn High School. It also shoehorned the even more elitist Millennium High School from Manhattan into the John Jay program. (In previous years, the two Millennium schools had followed the DoE’s apartheid playbook and formed their own segregated team, though they used John Jay’s facilities.)
In this past fall’s tryouts for girls’ volleyball, the impact of capitalism’s racist inequality was brutally obvious. Players from the two Millennium schools, who are predominantly white or Asian and middle-class, had the advantage of playing for private club teams when public school sports were shut down. For the most part, the Black and Latin players from the other John Jay schools lacked that opportunity—they couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars charged by the private clubs. They were effectively pushed aside by the programs’ merger. The coaches and PL members at John Jay had failed to think ahead about how to support them.
During the forum, players and their coach painted different pictures of the season. Crediting two Black players for bringing their concerns and ideas to him, the coach acknowledged that his old way of coaching was problematic. He said he recognized that he was caught in a contradiction between fighting for antiracism and playing the girls who’d sharpened their skills on the private club circuit. There were some positive developments over the season. The coaches and athletes worked to strengthen bonds among the players. Some multiracial friendships were formed.
But on the court, most of the Black and Latin athletes played relatively little during the regular season—and even less in this year’s playoffs, where John Jay lost in the city championship finals. The drive to win—to be “elite”—took precedence over antiracist unity and the entire squad’s development. This error was most hurtful to the Black and Latin players who rarely played. But it also hurt the girls who played the most, because it put them above the team and prevented them from truly uniting with the players on the sideline. It also fed into the elitism and de facto segregation that plagues the John Jay campus, where a racist Millennium assistant principal is notorious for surveilling the stairways and shooing away Black and Latin students off “his” floor, even when they’re trying to see the school nurse.
Students hold the power!
John Jay’s student athletes are powerful. Sometimes the victims of racism feel only rage and frustration, and powerlessness to make a difference—but not these young women. As one of them said, “The administration and PSAL failed Black and Latin children this year. They told them they’d protect them, and they didn’t.” These antiracist organizers have been bold in their demands and leadership to push John Jay’s integration efforts beyond the sports program. Several brave students stepped forward at the forum to expose other racist incidents. When a “Free Palestine” poster was stolen from a club’s “solidarity wall” at Millennium, and then burned on video, the response from the do-nothing principal was to ask the club to add a “Protect Israel” poster to the wall—to defend the Zionist bosses and their own vicious apartheid! When Black students reported that a white student at John Jay Law was posting gutter racist comments on social media, the administration told them not to let “words” hurt them.
But students are fighting back! They rebuked the Law administrators and pointed out that racist words have historically led to racist terror in this nation built on the savagery of slavery. They spoke of their unwillingness to be passive in the face of anti-Black racist state terror, and of how much they’d learned from the millions of protestors who took to the streets after George Floyd was murdered by the racist kkkops. They have distributed a list of demands to advance multiracial unity throughout the campus. Plans are in the works to unite the fightback at Millennium with the rest of John Jay by inviting the protest’s leaders to join the Campus Council, the student government for all four schools.
The main contradiction in capitalist schools is between the students and the education bosses. To smash this rotten system, students must be mobilized to unite with the international working class to destroy the rulers’ state and all of its institutions—to make a communist revolution. For now, our job is to support these students’ reform efforts, to help them organize, and to deepen their understanding of racism and how it can ultimately be defeated.
All workers win with communism
We know that capitalism feeds on racism and will never get rid of it . Only a multiracial fight to smash capitalism can lead us to a new society free of racism, sexism, and exploitation. That system is communism!
The opposite of capitalist competition is communist collectivity, a system that creates winners with no losers. PLP is organizing in more than two dozen countries for communism, drawing inspiration from the first workers’ states in the Soviet Union and China, which promoted mass participation in sports in the spirit of working-class solidarity. The slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution said it all: “Friendship first, competition second.”
Communists fight for a world where all workers reach their full potential in body and mind. Fight for communism! Join PLP!
