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Battle of Cable St: Red-led workers fight fascists
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- 03 November 2024 171 hits
This past October marked the 88th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street in London’s East End. In 1936, under communist leadership, British and immigrant workers broke through the police lines that protected the fascists, effectively thwarting their attempt to march and organize in working-class neighborhoods. In 2024, this history remains more relevant than ever.
Once again, fascism is on the rise, marked by a surge of racist and sexist attacks on the working class, imperialist wars, genocide, anti-Muslim attacks, scapegoating of migrant workers, and the resurgence of open fascist movements with their leaders seizing power in governments across the U.S. and the EU.
This summer, in the UK, fascism reared its ugly head as fascist groups such as the English Defense League, led by anti-migrant thug Tommy Robinson, and neo-Nazi elements, organized a racist rampage where they burned attacked migrants and Muslim workers. Fortunately, these racists were confronted by hundreds of multiracial, antifascist workers in a battle that lasted six days. Antiracist and antifascist workers and organizers linked arms to protect migrant shelters and fought back against the fascists.
Just a few days ago, a group of fascists took to the streets again to hold a rally in support of their imprisoned co-conspirators.
Once more, antiracist, antifascist workers rose up to make it clear that fascism and racism are unwelcome. The only way that workers can defeat the fascist onslaught is by rebuilding the communist movement everywhere—the only movement with a proven record of stopping fascism dead in its tracks—and smashing capitalism once and for all with communist revolution.
Red-led organizing prepares the battle ground against fascists
The constant communist-led, antifascist organizing over many years led to the understanding and empowerment of the working class. This battle also shows that the working class should never give in to nationalist leaders. Both Jewish and Irish community and religious leaders tried to convince the masses not to fight the fascists, fearful of “causing more problems.”
For 300 years, the East End of London had been the home of poor working class immigrants. In 1936 the area’s population was largely Polish and Russian Jewish, Irish Catholics and non-immigrant English workers.
In the midst of a severe depression, Sir Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts movement (BUF, British Union of Fascists) was growing among the unemployed, white-collar workers and small businessmen. Moseley sent committed fascists into the East End to beat up and terrorize Jewish-made scapegoats for the economic crisis. On the streets, fascists would scream “kill the k….” (racist insult against Jews)
Ruling class funds the fascists
Many of Britain’s upper and ruling class funded the BUF. Some of Britain’s big newspapers, such as the Daily Mail, Evening News and Sunday Dispatch, promoted the BUF. The recently crowned King Edward VIII had wealthy fascist friends in Britain, France and Germany. The police often turned a blind eye to the fascists’ beatings of Jewish workers.
Moseley decided to show his strength by marching 10,000 uniformed Blackshirts and thousands of supporters directly through the Jewish/Irish neighborhood. The police commissioner Sir Philip Game ordered his cops to support the march.
On October 4, 10,000 cops were assigned to protect Mosley’s fascists. The official Jewish “leadership” advised Jewish workers to stay indoors and not show aggressiveness towards the cops.
But up to 500,000 people from the East End and other parts of London came out to stop the fascist march. Communists and trade unionists, many themselves Jewish, led the attack on the fascists in the streets. At Cable Street, the police, armed with nightsticks, attacked, while mounted police charged the crowd. Horses stumbled because children were hurling marbles under their hoofs and bursting bags of pepper under their noses. Women threw the contents of chamber pots from windows.
The fascists screamed derogatory names for Jewish workers. But the people chanted, “They will not pass!”
Jewish, Irish dockworkers unite
The masses erected barricades. A truck was turned on its side to block the street; old mattresses, bricks and pushcarts were thrown on top. An Irish antifascist bus driver drove his double-decker bus across the road, forming a barricade between the police and the antifascists.
The army of fascists demanded the police escort them through the masses of workers. At Cable Street, the massive wall of workers held their ground and only backed off to pick up bricks or bottles to throw at the cops and fascists.
The fascists were under a constant hail of bricks, bottles and stones. Despite arresting over 100 anti-fascist fighters, still the police could not move the masses as they held the cops in a vise grip.
Eventually, the Police Commissioner canceled the BUF’s march. But now the police had to save them from being killed by the crowd. They attempted to escape. But the antifascists, waiting for them, shouted, “Get them!” and crashed through the police lines. They then chased the fascists out of London’s East End.
For days, people celebrated throughout London. The fascists continued to try to organize, but it was clear that workers wouldn’t be easily won to fascism.
Dare to struggle — Dare to win!
CHALLENGE CORRECTION
In the eighth paragraph of the 10/30 front papge article on the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) there was a factual error. The article claims that AFSME removed their entire elected NYC leadership but AFSME only removed their retiree leadership.
Workers and youth are searching for a communist home
A few weeks ago, several comrades and I went to a protest in Brooklyn connecting the racist and murderous use of KKKops in the subway to the genocide in Palestine. We used the experience of comrades in our group to decide to walk alongside the rally and march, rather than follow the leadership of march organizers who would likely provoke reactions from the police. While we walked alongside the march, a young person, probably in high school, came up to us, shared that he grew up in a Zionist household and that he is trying to educate himself and asked us why we were “pro-Palestine.” Although he disagreed with a lot of our ideas, he and around eight of his friends intently listened to our responses to his questions.
Later, as we crossed a street, one person asked us what flag we were holding. We said, “A communist flag!” They replied, “Yeah!!!” excitedly. As the night went on, we befriended a college student who recently moved to NYC and is looking for a communist home. This person later attended one of our study groups. While we helped this student locate his partner, a group of high school girls saw our red flags and approached us, “Wait, you mean actual communism?” They too asked several questions about communism and took papers.
As I was traveling home that night, my train was evacuated and I ended up taking an Uber home. I mentioned to my Uber driver that I was at a protest, which led to a political discussion that lasted all of five minutes. I gave him a copy of CHALLENGE, and he was so interested that I took his contact information and he showed up to our next study group and a game night. The night was incredibly inspiring and reminded me that workers are desperate for solutions that the bosses can’t offer, for communist ideas. It is our job to be in these struggles, in the streets, in our schools and jobs, and raise these ideas.
*****
System is violent; don’t be silent
In August, one of my students was shot in the neck. Earlier this month, he died. The school was very silent and hush-hush about his having been shot despite it being in the news. A student was the one who let me know that he died, and the school said nothing until two days after that. Even still, the only official word about his death has been one email from our social worker. I am now talking with the social worker about, at the very least, raising some funds for his family.
When kids die, and their school administration, teachers, and staff are silent, it sends the message that their lives didn’t matter. This racist system reinforces that message with every breath it takes. Capitalism kills and kills and spreads bloodthirsty lies that more privacy, more police in schools, more metal detectors will keep workers and students safer. I still need to do more to connect more with students and coworkers about honoring his life and do a better job of raising just how murderous and racist capitalism is.
*****
Workers’ unity knows no borders
Our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) club and study group are at the center of our organizing. At our last meeting we acknowledged the crisis of the war in the Middle East and Ukraine and the rivalry among imperialists for fascist control of the world’s resources, commerce and labor. However, we focused on the immigration issue in the U.S. First we analyzed the capitalists, our class enemy. Trump calls for mass deportations, immigrant concentration camps, a closed militarized southern border and mass racist hate and scapegoating of all immigrants. Harris calls for closing the border, finishing the wall, stopping entry to asylum seekers who must first apply in the first country they enter on their trek to the U.S., and passing the severe bill that Congress failed to pass last spring.
Starting with Trump and continuing with Biden and Harris, detained asylum seekers have been and are being sent to for profit private prisons in various states, especially in the southern states where they are jailed as criminals, even subject to solitary confinement, although almost none have criminal records. There are contradictions for the capitalists. The bosses need cheap labor, especially in agriculture, fishing and meat packing plants. They will need immigrant children and youth as soldiers in their imperialist wars. The working class in the U.S. is deeply divided with racist hate and xenophobia spiraling sharply. Workers blaming fellow workers for all their problems instead of blaming the capitalists and their profit system. Building international antiracist working class unity is PLP’s job! Our campaign for a pro-immigrant antiracist movement is starting small. having distributed PLP leaflets in solidarity with the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and displaying signs welcoming immigrants and asylum seekers.
We led two committees in the organization we’re in to write a letter of support for our sister and brother immigrants in Springfield. Members of the organization got 80 signatures in their committees. We’re in the process of reaching out to two groups of Ecuadorian workers. Our efforts to win younger workers will require persistence and patience. At our last study group meeting we collectively committed ourselves to write a new PLP leaflet in solidarity with all immigrants in this difficult period. Along with our friends we will propose and organize a workshop at the organization in early December. We’ll continue to ask other groups and churches to display our posters. We must expand CHALLENGE readers’ networks and distribution in the street. One friend stressed the importance of strong PLP leadership in our efforts. In action and organizing the working class gains confidence and trust in each other. We have to persevere, he said. Individual workers and students can’t solve their own problems. Together we have power, added a comrade. The fight will continue until we can destroy capitalism/imperialism and build a communist society, in keeping with the spirit of fallen comrades like Derek Pearl we fight everyday with unfaltering love for and confidence in the working class!
*****
Election studygroup exposes Harris
Educators in the Progressive Labor Party held a study group focused on rejecting the false choices of electoralism. Base members including a student and teacher attended seeking clarity on the question of voting this November. These base members demonstrated sharp and advanced working-class consciousness: they said that abstaining from the ballot box was already a huge topic with left-leaning people in NYC. Indeed, many workers in NYC have expressed their refusal to look away from the genocide of Palestinians—that one cannot vote for a “lesser” evil that slaughters innocents with incendiary bombs daily is an undercurrent of mass consciousness at our workplaces.
For this reason, our study group focused on advancing mass consciousness with a communist analysis drawn from our Party’s line. Instead of viewing each candidate as a “great man” of history acting by their own volition, we examined the constraints faced by the capitalist class as their profit system decays into fascism. We emphasized that the working class can only depend on each other, not the outcome of ruling class elections that reflected two paths of fascism: Big and Small (see the Glossary, p. 6).
We discussed how Donald Trump represents the “Small” Fascists who prioritize domestic interests and wield gutter racism, sexism, and anti-queer sentiment to appeal to reactive nationalistic elements. Without underestimating the violence that the Small Fascists can unleash, we then note how Kamala Harris represented the bigger danger as an avatar of the “Big” Fascists.
With analysis of political economy, we studied how Harris drew together an inclusive multicultural coalition to wage global imperialist warfare in the name of finance capital. That is, with a veneer of progressivism, Harris more easily captures the working class and recruits them for a future of fighting World War III. Hence, Harris has repeated since her nomination speech at the DNC that she will empower the U.S. military to be the “most lethal fighting force” on the planet. For Harris, the U.S. must swell the ranks of the military to perform genocidal violence to secure key resources in a planet beset by climate crisis, inter-imperialist rivalry, and falling rates of profit.
We ended the study group by examining the necessity of organizing the working class in preparing for fascism. We agreed that we must all learn how to adapt to increasingly repressive conditions as the crisis continues to roil capitalism. To do so, we highlighted the necessity of building a militant, international communist party that can retain and debate collective means of revolution. In other words, we stressed the need to build Progressive Labor Party.
*****
China-U.S. conflict over Taiwan continues to escalate
Reuters, 10/14–China's military started a new round of war games near Taiwan on Monday, saying it was a warning to the "separatist acts of Taiwan independence forces" and offered no date for when they may conclude … Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, had been on alert for more war games since last week's national day speech by President Lai Ching-te … said China had no right to represent Taiwan even as he offered to cooperate with Beijing … The Chinese military's Eastern Theatre Command said the "Joint Sword-2024B" drills were taking place in the Taiwan Strait and areas to the north, south and east of Taiwan … Chinese ships and aircraft are approaching Taiwan in "close proximity from different directions", focusing on sea-air combat-readiness patrols, blockading key ports and areas, assaulting maritime and ground targets and "joint seizure of comprehensive superiority" … China's coast guard circled Taiwan and staged "law enforcement" patrols close to Taiwan's offshore islands.
North Korean troops headed to fight in Ukraine
National Public Radio, 10/24–South Korea’s president vowed on Thursday to respond to North Korea’s deployment of troops to Russia, including by potentially supplying offensive weapons to Ukraine … South Korea’s intelligence chief told lawmakers Wednesday that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops, including special forces, to Russia for training, and that the North plans to increase that number to 10,000 by December.
The deployment of North Korean troops could add to concerns that the war risks spilling over and affecting tensions in Asia, from the Korean Peninsula to the Taiwan Strait … The North Koreans will likely be put “in charge of security and such at first. But as time goes by, and with training, they may be able to support Russian operations,” Lee says. “Then, it is expected that there will be many casualties during that process.”
Saudi Arabia vies with Iran in imperialist ambitions
Foreign Affairs, 10/22–There are many Middle Eastern conflicts that could reshape the global political order. But the one most likely to do so is the battle between the region’s two dominant powers: the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran … Iran and Saudi Arabia are both autocratic energy titans, collectively controlling nearly a third of the world’s oil reserves and a fifth of its natural gas … In Iran’s 1979 revolution, protesters … transformed the country from a U.S.-allied monarchy into an anti-American theocracy … 1979 was also a pivotal year for Saudi Arabia … the Saudi government abandoned modernization efforts and redirected vast resources to reactionary forces at home and abroad. The country empowered fundamentalist clerics to exercise control over education and the judiciary … In exporting these policies, in part with U.S. encouragement … Saudi Arabia spent tens of billions of dollars to fund thousands of mosques as well as jihadi groups that became the antecedents of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Bosses in Dominican Republic take the ethnic cleansing route
Associated Press, 10/8–The Dominican Republic said Tuesday it has deported or repatriated nearly 11,000 Haitians in the past week, fulfilling a pledge to do so weekly … The Dominican government announced last week that it would deport up to 10,000 Haitians a week … These are the largest such deportations in recent history there. The announcement prompted Haitian officials to request an emergency meeting at the Organization of American States, where Haitian permanent representative Gandy Thomas called the deportations “a strategy of ethnic cleansing” and “a discriminatory campaign against Haitians due to their nationality and color of their skin.” At least half a million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, according to human rights groups … The mass deportations have led to an increase in abandoned children across the Dominican Republic, warned activist William Charpentier … “They take their parents, or one of the parents, and leave the children behind, even while they’re in school.”
The 8 Places Most Affected by Climate Change
(UN World Food Program 4/21/2023)
1) South Sudan – Floods & Drought
2) Madagascar – Cyclones, Drought & Floods
3) Pakistan – Floods
4) Somalia – Drought
5) Sudan – Drought & Floods
6) Chad – Drought and Floods
7) Sahel (Includes Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali) Drought, Wildfires & Floods
8) The Dry Corridor (Includes El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) – Drought, Hurricanes & Floods
Within the last month, capitalist climate change helped create two torrential hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. They left behind massive destruction and hundreds of deaths and injuries from Florida to Virginia—including the “climate haven” of Asheville, North Carolina, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Massive flooding drenched the Mexican states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan.
First Hurricane Helene claimed the lives of more than two hundred people in the southeastern U.S., becoming the deadliest U.S. storm since Katrina in 2005. Just two weeks later, Hurricane Milton and its dozens of tornadoes devastated Florida, killing at least 25 and wreaking incalculable damage to roads, highways, homes, and public services. It left three million people without electricity and thousands without access to drinking water.
While hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires are all natural phenomena, their recent frequency, intensity, and unpredictability are anything but “natural.” They are the direct results of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide, that clog the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions are produced by the unchecked burning of oil, gas, and coal. Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of capitalist production and imperialist war machines, and the source of hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits for rulers in the U.S., Europe, China, and Russia. The blood of the workers killed by the wave of recent storms is on the bosses’ hands.
The international working class can stop global warming—but only if we smash the selfish parasites who have caused it. The only solution to climate change is communist revolution.
Hot and getting hotter
Since 1880, around the advent of capitalist industrialization, the average temperature on Earth has risen by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The last ten years have been the hottest in recorded history (climate.gov 1/18), and 2024 is on track to be the hottest of all.
Despite all the noise about clean energy and clean technology, each year sets a record for fossil fuel emissions. Given the relentless capitalist drive for maximum profit and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry, that trend looks unlikely to reverse any time soon. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently bragged that she and Joe Biden had overseen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because…we cannot over-rely on foreign oil” (apnews.com, 9/13). For once, Harris wasn’t lying. In August, U.S. oil production rose to an all-time high of 13.4 million barrels per day (mercurynews.com, 10/13). This unchecked use of fossil fuels and resulting warmer ocean temperature made a storm of Helene’s size and intensity up to five hundred times more likely (Yale Climate Connections, 10/9).
In Ashville, North Carolina, a “climate haven” high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Helene killed more than a hundred people; a hundred more are still missing (Forbes 10/15). In general, though, the worst climate carnage happens in places that are least responsible for carbon pollution—in such countries as Belize, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Sudan, Madagascar, and Pakistan. The effects of global warming have created more than 20 million climate refugees since 2010 (https://climatechampions.unfccc, 6/21/21).
Failing capitalist infrastructure
On top of making storms worse, capitalism has deepened the misery of the working class by failing to maintain basic infrastructure to control flooding. The bosses have compounded this crime by moving more and more workers into the most vulnerable areas. U.S. levees and flood control ponds, built to last no more than thirty years, are on average fifty years old (theconversation.com 5/10/2023). Infrastructure gets neglected because the world’s biggest capitalists are funneling trillions of dollars into their militaries to fight ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—and to prepare for an ever more likely World War III.
Poorer workers have been pushed by unaffordable housing costs into homes built in cheaper flood zones. When the inevitable floods come, under-insured workers are forced to sell their homes at basement prices to developers, who then repeat the process while raking in massive profits (The Real Deal 7/30/2019).
Harris and Trump: two fossil fuel stooges
With the U.S. presidential election looming, global warming promises to get worse regardless of who wins. It’s clear that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump are willing or able to protect workers from the worsening climate crisis. Trump represents a camp of capitalists that owns domestic energy firms—his motto is “Drill, baby, drill.” Harris, a willing stooge of the multinational oil companies and the big banks that finance them, is even more dangerous. Whatever lip service she pays to climate action, she’s not about to bite the hand that feeds her. The main wing bosses she represents need fossil fuels for their bottom line and for the massive military that protects U.S. ruling-class interests around the globe. Harris understands who she’s working for. Like all bought-and-paid for politicians, her rhetoric is designed to mislead workers, but her policies will always serve her capitalist masters.
In 2020, Biden and Harris campaigned on a promise to end new leases for oil and gas production on protected federal lands. Since then, their administration has signed over six thousand new leases, surpassing the massive number cleared under Trump (Center for Biological Diversity, 1/24/23). The huge Willow project by ConocoPhillips in Alaska, approved by Biden, will do as much annual damage to the environment equal to two million gas-powered cars (NRDC, 11/13/2023).
Save the planet with communist revolution!
There is no rational reason to power an economy with oil and gas. In addition to spawning super-storms and lethal floods, fossil fuel air pollution kills more than eight million workers a year (seas.harvard.edu, 2/9/21). Much of the technology to transition to clean energy already exists. What’s slowing it down is the profit system, and the bosses’ reliance on oil and gas to fight their wars.
The working class can do so much better. Stripped of the profit motive, a communist society would slash the use of fossil fuels because production would be based on the needs of the working class. We would use the sun, the wind, and nuclear energy. But as long as there is money to be made, the world won’t stop warming in time to prevent even more extreme weather events. For a safe and secure future, we must organize to smash capitalism.
There are two things we can do right now. One is to build solidarity among the working class to help the victims of these climate disasters around the world. In Florida and the Carolinas, workers are helping each other survive the latest capitalist nightmare. We can all be a part of this by going to our jobs and schools and organizing people to help with sending money and taking on the oil bosses. Whenever workers around the world are hurting, we should help them and fight for the working class.
The second thing—the most critical thing—is to build Progressive Labor Party and the movement for communist revolution. Only by ending production for profit can we build a society that serves the needs of the working class. Join us!
NEW YORK CITY, October 16 – The retired teachers chapter of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)—70,000 retirees—scored an unprecedented victory in June when we overthrew the leadership of the chapter for the first time in its over 60-year history. The pset came as a result of a several-years-long struggle against privatizing cutbacks in our health insurance, a result of backroom deals between the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), where the UFT is a dominant force, and the city.
The election victory brought national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten to New York to tell retirees: “We hear you. We will respond.” Only days later, the UFT withdrew its support for the program, Medicare (Dis)Advantage, that they themselves engineered! Why the sudden retreat? Weingarten and co. are terrified they might lose control of the union in the union-wide election scheduled for this coming spring. Communists and allies in the union have a crucial role to play in exposing the unions, and working inside them to build a multiracial movement for communist revolution and workers’ power.
Unions are part of the capitalist apparatus
As part of a deal with the City bosses in 2018 to help fund the teachers’ contract, the MLC agreed to find $600 million in additional healthcare savings each year!
Instead of organizing workers to fight for our needs, the union helped city bosses pass the costs onto the working class, resulting in this attack on retiree healthcare. That is the role of unions under capitalism: provide the appearance of fighting for workers while actually undermining our interests. For this reason, many workers are disgusted with unions, knowing they are frauds. But not uniting with other workers and fighting back is itself a fatal error.
We gotta be in it to win it! The muck and mire of organizing
The only reason retirees got this far is because we have united with other workers and organized class struggle inside these unions. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have played a key role in this struggle, introducing communist concepts of antiracism, class consciousness, and workers’ unity. The struggle is long-range, so we must have a long-range outlook. And we have to shed many illusions.
One illusion is that winning this election will “take back control of our union.” It’s true: pro-worker leadership can give workers a voice inside the union. We can begin a real mobilization around our common interests, like improved healthcare and pension benefits, and confronting the school system’s racist segregation. But the ruling class is not about to allow workers to control unions.
Just this past February, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) removed its entire elected NYC leadership because they had been fighting for their workers’ needs. The AFT/UFT have been comfortably in the pocket of Democratic Party bosses for years, churning out votes and deceiving workers into supporting capitalism, while Democratic politicians without exception have presided over deteriorating conditions for workers’ standard of living and rising fascism, as they prioritize defending the declining U.S. empire as it gets increasingly outmaneuvered by rising imperialists China, Russia, and Iran.
Another dangerous illusion is that the courts will save us. It’s true that several court decisions have supported the retirees’ fight to maintain their present Medicare plans, based on promises enshrined in city law (laws that workers fought for!), but that will not stop City bosses—who are already appealing the latest decision—from going after workers’ healthcare benefits. Like the unions, the courts are controlled by the same capitalist bosses that EVERY SINGLE TIME will put bosses’ profits ahead of workers’ needs.
Build a base in the working class
As this new leadership gets its footing, and as the coming union-wide election builds steam, communists in PLP and their allies are fighting for ideological leadership inside this growing movement. We are fighting for antiracism, antisexism, and multiracial unity, mobilizing long-marginalized paraprofessionals (who are more likely Black and Latin), forging bonds with in-service educators to fight for the needs of the students (the main targets of school bosses’ attacks).
We are building solidarity with workers in other city unions, who have seen through this healthcare struggle that we have common interests. We are struggling with workers to see that, at its root, it’s not just the privatization of our healthcare that is our enemy, it’s the capitalist system itself. Using CHALLENGE, study groups, and ties of friendship, we are building a base with these workers, trust forged in struggle for the future of our class, for our children and grandchildren, for workers power and a communist world.
