I joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for many reasons. Most importantly it was my shared hatred for the way things are currently governed under the capitalist catastrophe, in combo with the harsh realities of being a Black worker forced to live under this racist system. A woman PL’er introduced me to communist ideas. I began revealing to her things that bothered me about our existence as Black people and how our lives aligned with others around the world, and she helped me realize the ways in which my thought processes aligned with party’s line.
My family has been fighting against police and the racist system since I was a child. Watching my family fight with such frequency has made the police the enemy in my eyes. I can recall memories of waking up with guns in our faces, as the police would kick in my grandmother’s door looking for her sons, my uncles, to lock them up. In addition to my hate for this decaying system and its KKKOPS, there was always this sense of disbelief that stirred in me whenever I listened to politicians talking.
I watched how Demopublicans or Republicrats, whichever party they claim to be, don’t really care about you and me. Yet they terrorize and deprive, working people, especially Black workers of the basic rights they claim to protect.
I would alway laugh at their promises of equality, and justice. It was this and my experiences of being a Black man in the U.S., as well as observing the experiences of my working class brothers and sisters that uncovered these lies to me early on in life.
When I returned to Puerto Rico in April with the brigade of comrades from New York and New Jersey to affirm our solidarity with the island’s residents, I was able to see my values put in practice. There were six of us from the original 25 members of last year’s summer project. We revisited the school in Toa Baja and found out that the school had been reopened because of petition efforts by the local parents and teacher organizations. To see parents, teachers, and workers from the community defy the island bosses, occupy the school, and turn it into a community center was supremely powerful for me to witness. It makes me want to get more involved! It showed me that like Black workers, Puerto Rican workers have a resiliency and determination that I admire. They keep fighting no matter how hard they get knocked down.
To be able to do this type of work has developed my awareness of class-consciousness;the same things they are doing to you, they are doing to me. We are in the same class and if we struggle together we can win.
Moreover, my newfound camaraderie with PLP members helped shape my creative process as a film-maker/documentarian, such that it enabled me to use my craft as a vessel for communicating anti-racist and communist values.
PLP gave me a whole new perspective for understanding the world, and the way capitalism is constantly contorting, shape-shifting and creating new ways to distort our reality, and create unnatural divisions amongst workers. Best of all, the most exciting part of being a communist is the way it makes me feel, more alive as opposed to just living or existing. Looking back I always felt like communism was natural to me.
I decided to commit to communism and join the Progressive Labor Party because it was the right thing to do—the progressive thing to do for my family, friends, community, and the earth.
These are loose stats but it feels as though one out of two people I talk to are workers who are tired of working, exhausted by capitalism, not having insurance and drinking Robitussin and other homemade remedies for their colds and ailments because they can’t afford to go pay for prescribed medicine.
I’m done with being super-exploited as a Black, queer woman and disgusted with U.S. imperialism and the effects that war and greed has on the Earth’s land and atmosphere. I’m done with knowing that we should do better and not acting.
I joined because from Puerto Rico to Jersey, there are food deserts leaving workers stranded with little to no healthy food options or food that’s not injected with hormones and making them sick.
I joined because my mother has been on disability for the last 20 years, making a little under $2,000 a month. She’s had a looming cloud of fear to even go back to her former place of employment, the Post Office, because of her past trauma of being treated like a slave as a mail carrier. I joined because of my father sacrificing his spirit, wasting away emotionally and physically as a NJTransit Bus Driver, working day to night and overworking on his days off and on vacation to provide for my mother and I. Working is the center of his world. The center of his next world is retirement and moving down to a Southern state.
However, more of us want the center of our next world to be different—to not revolve around a potential reward of resting and a pension in exchange for 60 years of labor. Sixty years of not connecting with your family, isolating yourself from your community and only being able to help those closest to you. Sixty years of back and neck injuries, temper flares, trauma, alcoholism and depression.
I joined because my brother, cousin, best friend and many others that I know in Newark and in other parts of New Jersey are limited to low wage jobs at the Post Office, UPS, Amazon and the Newark Airport as their options. The youth know that retirement and a pension is not guaranteed in 40 years. That is no longer a reality for many of us; we don’t stay at one job for 40 years but work pay-check to pay-check, working up to five jobs at the same time. I am no longer okay with knowing better and not doing better.
I joined because I’m fed up with reformism and respectability politics and shaming the poor, working class on whether they vote or not. I’m tired of police brutality and innocent people dying in prisons, I’m tired of street harassment and microagressions in the work place.
The Progressive Labor Party is passionate and direct about what our struggles are and what we need to do to win and defeat capitalism.
PLP is about struggling, growing, caring for each other and equally critiquing others and ourselves on how to be better for the sake of the world. PLP meets people where they are at and connects our personal problems to a bigger picture of how capitalism is destroying us all. But instead of taking on the problems of capitalism by ourselves or complaining about or making a meme about it here and there, PLP challenges us to work together and destroy capitalism instead.
I’m here for it, I’m dedicated to it and I’m hopeful for the future and the solutions that we put into practice. We know the problems, now let’s connect and build towards a new center and a better world. Long live PLP! Long live communism!
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Stop & Shop strike exposes lousy union; inspires all!
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- 05 May 2019 313 hits
BOSTON, MA, April 29–On April 11, Stop & Shop workers at 240 stores went on strike in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in the first grocery workers’ strike in 15 years at the only unionized supermarket chain in New England. Strikers said NO to low wages, attacks on pension plans, ending overtime pay for Sundays and holidays, drastic cuts to health care plans, and reduced hours for part-time workers. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends walked picket lines at half a dozen stores in Boston and Worcester, urging other workers to support the strike and calling for an end to the capitalist profit system.
This strike was a heroic attack on a huge capitalist company and adds to the encouraging rise of strikes in the U.S. It was nearly 100 percent solid and strongly supported by customers. Stop & Shop lost $100 million during the 11-day strike, 75 percent of their business. Worker solidarity beat back many company attacks, but workers still remain at semi-starvation wages.
The enemy is capitalism
Stop & Shop is owned by Ahold Delhaize (owner of Food Lion, Hannaford, Martin’s, among others), a Dutch corporation with 375,000 employees and stores in 11 countries. Ahold made a $2 billion profit last year, and is valued at $23 billion. This is an example of what Karl Marx called “consolidation of capital”—big companies gobble up smaller companies in order to cut costs, and stay competitive against their rivals. This law of capitalist economics can’t be changed through laws and regulations, or by working for “better” companies. The profit Stop & Shop made last year averages $6,000 per worker. In other words, each worker loses 1/4 of their pay to profit the company. Imagine, giving up 1/4 of your (already low) paycheck to make wealthy shareholders even richer –and it’s all legal under capitalism! That’s why we need a revolutionary change to a system of communism, where workers run society and profits and exploitation are illegal.
Undemocratic union sold out part-time workers
A Stop & Shop worker in Worcester, MA said workers at her store are angry: “We went on strike for all the workers. But there are no union meetings, and part-time workers got almost nothing.” Union leaders told workers to go back to work before they even saw or had a chance to vote on the new contract. Seventy-five percent of Stop & Shop workers are part-time, and their average pay averages $12.75/hour. Many who work 30 hours a week have no health or retirement benefits. Many part-time workers had their hours cut in the last few months, with no promise of getting their old hours back. The lowest-paid workers got only a 25-cent raise. The worst part of the contract is the “two-tier” system: new hires get lower wages, pensions, and benefits than current workers, dividing them from the better-paid full-time and longer-serving workers.
Striker’s fight inspired other workers
The strikers faced a tough battle as Stop & Shop kept some stores open using management as scabs. The company also used workers from prison-release programs as scabs, at much higher pay than most employees! The strikers weren’t allowed to even talk with workers, such as security, who are not part of the union, making it harder to spread the strike. The police sided with the company, not letting strikers at some stores block driveways to keep shoppers from crossing the picket line. And the union, United Food and Commercial Workers, only gave $100 a week in strike benefits.
Strike support spread
Many workers from other trades supported this strike. Teamsters, or truck drivers refused to make food deliveries. At one picket line, 25 members of the steelworkers union–some recently locked out by gas company NSTAR for demanding a labor contract–showed up and militantly confronted shoppers. Members of other unions (teachers, electrical and construction workers) also walked the picket lines. PLP members visited picket lines, and gave out strike support leaflets in English and Spanish and CHALLENGE newspapers. Politicians such as Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren showed up, hoping for votes, but it was working class solidarity that won the day, bringing strikes as workers’ strongest weapon back into the consciousness of the working class of New England.
Let’s also bring the ideas of workers’ power and communist revolution into the consciousness of workers everywhere.
Colombia–As we prepare for May Day, the International Worker’s holiday, when millions of workers around the world will march to celebrate the history of struggle against the terrorist capitalist system with its crisis of its over production, competition for maximum profits, and capitalist rivalries, that threaten a new imperialist world war.
Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in Colombia would like to send all workers, comrades, friends and supporters of PLP around the globe, militant and warm greetings. With each passing May Day it becomes abundantly clear that the boss’ democracy does not work for the benefit of the working class, and it cannot be reformed. Thus the capitalist system and its bankrupt democracy must be destroyed by worker’s power.
Capitalism creates a world where countless women, men, and children die by the millions because of poverty, incurable illnesses, racist killings at the hands of the bosses police and military, and environmental poisoning. Horrible conditions such as unemployment, wage slavery, sexism and war, do not automatically make workers communists, nor do they breed a revolutionary consciousness. It is only when millions of oppressed workers gain class consciousness, the understanding of the enemy capitalism, and make the decision to fight and unite as a single class. This must be done under the revolutionary leadership of a party. Only then can we overthrow this rotten system.
On this special day we make a call to our comrades, and workers around the world to strengthen ourselves in the face of adversity. More than ever we need to develop and disseminate the revolutionary line of the PLP. We must always strive to self criticize our mass work, and look for ways to build a stronger party, using the dialectical principles(the science of class struggle), of quality and quantity. We need to be part of the class struggle even more, be creative, constant and scientific, showing once again that revolution is possible. Unlike the mobster politicians and revisionist crooks who say that these are illusions or things of the past, that revolutionary struggles are obsolete. Nevertheless, we must fight united against our exploiters, and reject class collaboration.
On this May Day a contingent of the PLP in more than a dozen countries will march along with workers, students and soldiers showing the revolutionary potential of our class. We march with only one interest, destroying the capitalist system with communist revolution, and building a world where production and distribution will satisfy every workers needs. A world where workers are in charge of their own destinies. Everything we do will be for the communist cause.
Here in Colombia we organize and lead the struggle to defend our class brothers and sisters, to try to build up our ranks with our literature and win workers to our revolutionary message. We fight to make our presence known in political, worker and student meetings. Comrades of the world lets charge towards international communist revolution, we fight to establish the proletariat dictatorship. Dark night will have its end, with a new and glorious communist dawn.
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Delivery workers demand Sage restaurant serve justice
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- 05 May 2019 209 hits
BROOKLYN, April 30 – Early this month delivery workers made a brave decision to stage a protest and work stoppage against their racist bosses at Sage, a Thai restaurant in the Williamsburg neighborhood. These mostly Latin and immigrant workers had been meeting with a Bushwick-based community organization, in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is active. The racist bosses at Sage have stolen $500,000 in back pay from their workers (Eater New York, 4/3). The workers are also seeking paid overtime and sick leave. Capitalism exists to extract profits from all workers, and superprofits from our class’ most vulnerable members. These working class fighters are starting to realize they have the power to change their condition. PLP is working to move them even further, to fight for a world free from all exploitation—communism.
Racist owner panics
The protesters were chanting both inside and outside the restaurant as delivery workers spoke and publicized their demands. The owner, who had been absent up to this point, was forced to come in and cancel all deliveries. We rallied for about three hours. While the scared owner was talking to the lawyers, we forced him to agree to sit down with the workers and their lawyers at a later date to discuss the demands.
We also warned the owner he could not take reprisals against any of the workers, including those inside the restaurant, such as the cooks and busboys, who also joined the stoppage.
Reclaiming the fightback
The event’s success speaks to a resurgence of militancy in the organization. In recent years, liberals have infiltrated and transformed the neighborhood organization into a political lobbying group, pushing a legal strategy in the state legislature and backing certain politicians.
In the past, PLP members and their friends were able to fight for, and organize, direct on-the-job protests. Then, organization members had a place to come to discuss their workplace problems, ask for help and make a plan of action. They would organize rallies and make demands of the owners/bosses of the workplace, threatening to take them to court if they didn’t pay back stolen wages to the workers.
Nowadays, the only actions that get done are when the organization’s lawyers file cases with the Department of Labor. These can take years to get solved. Sometimes they go nowhere. Liberals talk a big game about workers’ rights, but they’re toothless when it comes to real action.
In the last year, we have demanded that the leaders of this community organization take direct action again, and actually confront the owners/bosses like before. This push resulted in the April 1 action.
Reflections
Workers were excited and pleased with the action. We discussed the need to continue to raise workers’ consciousness in the fightback against the bosses. Actions like these when multiplied are what prepare the working class for the most important fight ahead of us: communist revolution.
