Words of praise poured in for the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison when she died on August 5, 2019. She was lauded for her mastery of language, the depth of her characterizations, and her profound understanding of the lived consequences of sexism and racism. She was also celebrated as a national treasure. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy K. Smith wrote, “I don’t believe there is a writer who understood America better and loved it with more ferocity than Toni Morrison.” There is no doubt that Morrison was not a radical, but a liberal, and that her heavy reliance on psychoanalysis to explain her characters’ behavior fails to target the roots of their systemic oppression in the coercive power relations generated by capitalism.
Morrison’s Black female characters: Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula and Nell in Sula (1973), Sethe and Baby Suggs in Beloved (1987) all experienced extreme suffering, physical and psychological. But the direct and indirect sources of their oppression, found in the capitalist drive to profit, remain obscure. Morrison’s idealist approach to causality is reinforced in her novels by her occasional reliance upon the supernatural to account for her characters’ motivations. In her book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Morrison ahistorically traces many white writers’ individualistic conceptions of heroism to a generalized need to dominate and marginalize a racialized “other”; the material origins of this need remain largely unexplored.
In one of her novels, however—A Mercy (2008)—Morrison quite persuasively utilizes the tools of class analysis to explore the origins of race-based social inequality. Set in late 17th-century colonial America, the novel confirms and enacts a Marxist understanding of the ways in which the category of race emerged and then hardened as capital accumulation took increasingly brutal forms. The kinds of insights into the origins of race and racism that we gain from historical texts like Lerone Bennett’s The Shaping of Black America (1973) and Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997) are amply borne out in Morrison’s fictional treatment. Theodore Allen’s biographer asserts that Morrison claimed to have read both volumes of Allen’s important study before writing A Mercy.
The novel stresses the common oppression experienced by a group of laborers in the same household: Lina, a Native American woman who survived a smallpox epidemic; Rebekkah, an English mail-order bride from an impoverished family of religious fanatics; Sorrow, a dark-skinned young woman who refuses to hate her own body; Scully and Willard, two indentured servants who may never escape their bondage; and Florens, a young woman of mixed parentage who mourns her unexplained abandonment by her mother. Moreover, Jacob Vaarck, the “master” of the household, while clearly positioned to benefit from the labor of those he controls, is portrayed as initially humane and free of racialized preconceptions. He respects as an equal the free Black man whom he hires as a blacksmith; he hardens into a racist only when his wealth is invested in the Caribbean slave trade, and he aspires to turn his farmhouse into an Old World-style mansion with wrought-iron gates.
The novel is a painful read, in that Florens, through whose consciousness much of the story is told, never understands why her mother—an enslaved Angolan brought to Barbados—chose to “give” her away to Jacob Vaarck. Only at the end is the reader exposed to the thoughts of Florens’s mother, who feared that her spirited daughter would be dragged into the whorehouse of chattel slavery should she remain on the Caribbean plantation. Ironically, the loss of her daughter was “a mercy” compared to such a fate.
Mainly, though, the novel testifies to the fluidity of conceptions of race in the colonial period; indeed, the narrative never uses the categories that would subsequently become “natural” descriptors: white, Black, Negro Indian. Moreover, Bacon’s Rebellion of 1677—the last multiracial rebellion of oppressed laborers before the hardening of racial divisions—is referenced early in the novel as a lost possibility.
The novel is narrated in the present tense: the reader knows where the nation is headed, but the characters do not. That the United States should end up being founded on racialized inequality was a function of the ideologies of superiority and inferiority accompanying the development of capitalism, not an inevitable reflection of the human need to exploit those who look different. Tracy K. Smith’s description of Morrison as a lover of America is not borne out of the incisive analysis of the class-engendered politics of divide and conquer that shapes A Mercy. In this novel, Morrison may have “understood” America; that she “loved it with . . . ferocity” is highly dubious.
Guerrero, MEXICO—A massive demonstration on September 26 will commemorate the struggle for the return of the 43 students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa five years ago. The details of this incident, part of the criminal history of the capitalist system against the working class, have never been been revealed. Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) believe that as long as the capitalists are in power, they will continue to use state violence and criminal gangs to assassinate and disappear the students and workers who fight back. The only way to confront the bosses’ violence is to organize our class for communist revolution!
Guerrero: target for local, international capitalists
The state of Guerrero, where the rural education school of Ayotzinapa is located, has historically been one of the poorest in Mexico. The misery of the workers in this mountain region is similar to the most extreme poverty in Africa, and has its roots in the racist exploitation of a population with indigeneous and African roots.
International and local capitalists look to amass the wealth of the resources in the region through militarization to enforce increasingly fascist order upon the working class around some of the richest gold mines in Mexico. Exploitation of these mines, along with some of the largest poppy fields in the country, require tight control of the territory and the transportation routes by the drug traffickers located in the region.
To the bosses, any working class resistance that threatens their profits is unacceptable. With the support of the political apparatus of the capitalist state, especially the police and the military, they can protect their investments by systematically attacking the students and workers. Under capitalism, these criminal groups of capitalists entrenched in the mining industry and the repressive state apparatus are one and the same - and the workers need to organize to confront them all!
Capitalist dictatorship fears workers’ fightback
The previous government administration, under Enrique Peña Nieto, used so-called “education reform” to begin to eliminate teachers’ schools and to criminalize all types of social protest. Those of us fighting these conditions found ourselves in the crossfire of the repressive forces of organized crime that in reality are the same part of the police, military and paramilitary capitalist state apparatus that protects the mining interests and drug trafficking interests in the state.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) promised justice in the Ayotzinapa case, but the repression of the workers has only increased since he came to power. In order for the capitalist class to carry out their exploitation and control of the region’s resources, AMLO has taken advantage of the support of the working class that brought him to power to guarantee the benefits of the capitalists. For example, his new “ley garrote” (nightstick law), enacted in the state of Tabasco criminalizes social protest and resistance to the capitalists’ megaprojects. There can be no justice for the workers under capitalism. The laws and the courts only serve to defend the interests of the capitalists.
Past and present: workers rebel!
This oppression has given rise to armed rebellion that began in the 1970s, under the leadership of teachers Genaro Vasquez and Lucio Cabanas, who graduated from the rural Education School of Ayotzinapa. For many young people in the region, to become a teacher is to live a life of subsistence. Many of these young teachers have helped to raise the political consciousness of the working class communities where they work. For this reason, the state has begun to eliminate these rural education schools and the resistance that they generate, due in large part to the pro-working class and communist ideas they learn in the schools.
We cannot expect justice from poiticians like AMLO. Only a society led by the workers can end the misery, exploitation and crimes committed against our class. PLP honors the memory of the 43 students and all of our class brothers and sisters who have been killed or disappeared for the bloodlust of capital. We call on the workers to have confidence in our class and to organize against this criminal system. Read and distribute CHALLENGE and join a study group or action today!
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Kashmir: nationalism & regional rivalry on the rise
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- 30 August 2019 414 hits
On August 5, 38,000 paramilitary troops from India entered the “semi-autonomous” area of Kashmir, an open act of imperialist occupation. They were acting on orders from hyper-nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his fascist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This is just the latest in a string of vicious attacks conducted by the BJP, which has dramatically ramped up anti-Muslim racism in the country. Recently it threatened to strip citizenship status from nearly four million workers in the Indian state of Assam, and deport them to Bangladesh (Slate, 8/9).
In service to the Indian capitalist ruling class, Modi and the BJP are desperately trying to consolidate control over resource-rich Kashmir at the expense of capitalist rivals in Pakistan and China. They have been emboldened by the tacit support of imperialists in the U.S. and European Union, who share an interest in slowing the advance of Chinese imperialism.
As with any conflict between rival capitalist bosses, the working class stands to suffer the most. Confronted with the poisons of imperialism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism, workers in Kashmir need to reject all capitalist political traps in favor of proletarian internationalism. As the international working class, we must unite in the communist Progressive Labor Party and organize a mass Red Army that crushes the capitalist class worldwide and builds a communist society to meet workers’ needs.
Economic, political crisis drive Indian fascism
For years, Modi and the BJP have sought to divide workers by fanning the flames of anti-Muslim racism. In 2015, a year after the party assumed power, India saw a 17 percent increase in religiously motivated violence (India Today, 2/10/17). In 2002, as chief minister of Gujarat state, Modi himself infamously presided over the massacre of more than a thousand Muslims at the hands of fascist mobs (Washington Post, 8/16).
India is the world’s seventh largest economy, home to a huge, productive working class and major industrial centers. But the contradictions of capitalism are provoking an economic contraction. Growth slowed to 6.8 percent in 2018 and to 5.7 percent in the last fiscal quarter. The automobile and real estate industries are in crisis (Economic Times, 8/21).
By exerting more direct control over Kashmir, the Indian ruling class sees an opportunity to reverse the economic slowdown. They hope to cancel a law blocking outsiders from buying property in the state, a potential land grab like the Israeli bosses’ racist seizure of territory in occupied Palestine. Although the population of Kashmir at present is majority Muslim, the Indian rulers’ takeover could drastically change the demographic to majority Hindu—a de facto and inevitably deadly ethnic cleansing (Foreign Affairs, 8/9).
The BJP also aims to take charge of Kashmir’s glaciers and rivers, including the Indus, which serves almost 270 million people (GlacierHub, 3/13). Control over fresh water equates to power in India, where lethal heat waves this summer rocked the country and killed dozens (New York Times, 6/13). As climate change threatens greater ecological destruction, the bosses’ fights over water will only become more deadly.
Inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens in South Asia
That the U.S. and EU made hardly a sound about the occupation speaks to their own internal divisions, but also to the rise of fascism on an international scale. The gutter racist politics of Modi and the BJP finds common ground with nationalist appeals from U.S. Klansman-in-chief Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and France’s Marine Le Pen.
The U.S. and European bosses’ tolerance of Modi’s aggression in Kashmir also reflects India’s strategic importance as a counter to rising imperialist power China. China has governed a portion of Kashmir since the early 1960s, and recently has pushed to expand its influence in the region. China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative has invested nearly $50 billion in the area (Foreign Affairs, September 2019).
The Chinese rulers’ support for Pakistan, India’s chief regional rival, sharpens the inter-imperialist tensions. In 2016, the Chinese Overseas Port Holding Company opened a deep water port in the coastal Pakistani city of Gwadar in populous Balochistan Province, securing a 43-year contract for resource extraction. At least 22,000 students from Pakistan are now studying in China, a dramatic increase (The Diplomat, 1/24/18). The Indian bosses’ racist anti-worker offensive in Kashmir aims not only to weaken Pakistani capitalism today, but also to prepare for a Chinese imperialist challenge tomorrow.
Although Trump’s erratic foreign policy has complicated relations here as elsewhere, the U.S. ruling class remains mostly aligned in backing India as a counterweight to China. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis paid diplomatic visits after India purchased a missile system from the Russian bosses (Bloomberg, 9/3/18).
While Trump and the domestically oriented capitalists he represents bear obvious political parallels to Modi’s racist nationalism, the finance capital main wing of U.S. imperialism has nurtured close economic and military ties with the Indian capitalists for close to two decades, through the Barack Obama presidency (Foreign Affairs, September 2019).
Reject all capitalist misleaders, fight for communist revolution
Though treated as pawns in a power struggle between multiple nuclear-armed countries, workers in Kashmir have not taken their oppression and exploitation lying down. Since the start of the Indian military occupation in early August, the working class has regularly clashed with security forces and led marches and demonstrations in opposition. In the Soura neighborhood of Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city, workers have put up barricades and armed themselves with stones (Al Jazeera, 8/20).
Unfortunately, the workers’ brave efforts risk being absorbed into the bosses’ reactionary movements. Local opposition parties, like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, have vocally opposed the occupation. But these liberal reformers will never advocate for the destruction of capitalism and the dictatorship of the working class. Like all bosses, they seek to unite workers around the dead ends of nationalism and religion—the covers they need to exploit us in their own interests.
To truly advance to our own collective liberation, we need a Party that rejects all of the bosses’ deadly schemes: the international Progressive Labor Party. Building a mass PLP to organize communist revolution is the only way out of the disaster of capitalism. From Kashmir to Palestine, from Mexico to Tanzania—workers of the world, unite!
The latest proposal to address the most segregated and largest public school system—eliminate all “gifted” programs. Why now?
For the last twenty years the liberal politicians in New York City have sanctioned the segregation of the school system at the expense of Black and Latin youth in favor of relying on a few elite high schools to directly serve the needs of the ruling class. Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, acknowledge that “separate” could never be equal.
However, now, with greater competition internationally and domestically the bosses need to reverse that trend in order to have a united working class in preparation for future wars.
How do you spell racist? DoE
The Department of Education (DoE), and their racist policies consigns the vast majority of Black and Latin children—approximately 75 percent of the city’s 1.1 million public school student population—to a segregated, second class education. These bosses continually expose themselves as the shameless racists they are by subjecting students to daily searches, unequal funding, unsafe drinking water, and unhealthy lunches.
It has to do with war & splits
With war plans always on the burner for the imperialists, they need a more robust multiracial-armed force to take on their biggest rivals, China and Russia. They also need to fight their domestically oriented rivals who have not been won to the Big Fascists’ long-term outlook, “Rising inequality also is straining the health of liberal democracy. The idea of ‘we the people’ is fading because, in this era of yawning inequality, there is less we share in common. As a result, it is harder to build support for the kinds of policies necessary to deliver broad-based prosperity in the long term, like public investment in education and infrastructure” (NYT 8/24). These Big Fascists understand that president Donald Trump, and the domestic-oriented bosses whom he represents, is bad for a liberal world order. The Democrats are corralling supporting for a top-down reform movement that will be used to crush the opposition. In other words, this fake anti-racism will be used as leverage against the subordinate wing.
For the main wing bosses, there is a need for them to win the allegiance of the most disaffected youth and their families into believing the system can work for them. In New York City, that is the role of the fairly newly appointed chancellor of schools, Richard Carranza—he is the latest person that has been chosen to break up the old status quo and attempt to put in place a new face on the racist school system.
Many progressive educators and youth, tired of dealing with and living with the racist conditions of the schools, were excited and encouraged when Carranza came out with guns blazing, claiming he would integrate one of the most segregated school systems in the country. His outward boldness in confronting the racism in schools was a marked difference from his predecessor Carmen Farina. In one of his first public appearances he declared, “We cannot have excellence, we cannot improve outcomes without tackling the inequities that exist in our system,” (Chalkbeat, 9/4/18).
Unsurprisingly, one year later, Carranza has failed to deliver on his seemingly anti-racist goals and is now in year two of his tenure and trying to tamper down expectations, “If I integrated the system, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to walk on water,” (New York Times, 8/23).
We say that good schools are integrated schools, that good schools take the learning of each student seriously, and that it’s impossible for a segregated school to be a good school. We also know that there are no good schools under capitalism.
Real communists led anti-racism
The fight at Park Slope Collegiate (PSC) which began in 2010 around school integration illuminated how the DoE was building segregation by installing “elite” schools into neglected campuses where mainly Black and Latin students attended. Because of the united, militant, multiracial, and anti-racist fightback of students, parents, teachers and community members at the school throughout the years, the liberal bosses needed to ensure that other schools would not follow in PSC’s example.
The bosses only want a showpiece adjustment to school segregation. One of the key lessons learned from the PSC struggle is that multiracial unity is the key to defeating racism and the bosses are incapable of creating a school system that serves the need of the working class.These liberal misleaders will never be able to give working class youth the education they deserve.
Not surprisingly, when faced with real anti-racist fightback, the DoE’s response was to attack the school years later with claims of “Communist organizing” (New York Times, 5/4). This failed attempt at extinguishing the fightback happening at the school is deeply rooted in antiracist history going as far back to the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s and through the Civil Rights movement and beyond. Communists have led the multiracial fightback against racism in the streets, the schools and universities, the workplace, and the military.
The liberal bosses in NYC were counting on anti-communism to frighten and silence anyone who stood up against their racist policies. The investigation also laid bare the ugly reality that liberal politicians are the main enemy under capitalism. Even though this attack was initiated from three anti-communist staff members inside of the school, the DoE along with the liberal mayor, de Blasio and then school chancellor Carmen Farina, were silent during this attack on this integrating school while publically paying lip service to school integration.
Fake anti-racism
Lip service is still all the bosses have delivered under Carranza and de Blasio. The liberal duo were unsuccessful in their attempt to increase the enrollment of Black and Latin students at the specialized high schools in what would have been the most prominent forced integration plan since the civil rights movement. The State Legislature killed the plan largely due to opposition from Asian lawmakers and a billionaire’s lobbying push. Carranza and de Blasio have failed to convince them that they have to sacrifice to the cause of winning Black and Latin students into the system.
Carranza has also spent $23 million on instituting mandatory implicit bias training for all 125,000 of NYC’s teachers along with more culturally responsive curriculum. The training essentially removes the blame from the bosses and the racist education system that they have created and supported and places it on individual teachers. We call on teachers to reject this fake anti-racist training and instead unite with their students and their parents and fellow education workers in fightback. We must train our future leaders to fight against the whole capitalist system.
Defeat the bosses and their ideas
Capitalism causes the working class to fight for the scraps from their table. Instead of fighting for a system that meets the needs of the whole working class. Under communism, every school will be a place that meets the needs of its students. Education would be class conscious, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist. Communism needs the workers to be educated to help to remake the world. The fight for school integration now is an opportunity to root this education in the struggle against the bosses whom we will have to defeat to win the world we deserve.
INDIANA, August 24—The Gary Police Department took the life of yet another Black worker: 25-year-old Rashad Cunningham. So, the fires of anti-racism and working-class anger were especially bright today. Progressive Labor Party canvassed with CHALLENGE in Rashad’s neighborhood, participated in a local antiracist community cookout, and joined a march in front of the police station. Today showed that the working class needs and are open to communist ideas.
Rashad was shot while sitting in his car in front of his home in Gary on August 17. Since his murder, there have been demonstrations, vigils, and marches organized on a near-daily basis by his family and supported by the community and families of others in the city who have had their loved ones murdered by the same fascist cop force.
Take CHALLENGE to the neighborhood
Before the cookout, PL’ers went to the neighborhood where Rashad was murdered by the racist GPD and went door-to-door talking to people and selling CHALLENGE, the newspaper that explains that the police force descends from the slave patrols—a militia hired by the enslavers to police and capture runaway enslaved people and punish rebels. No reform that change that basic truth. The ruling class set their sights on destroying the working-class unity by gutting jobs, displacing quality teachers, and terrorizing the working class with kkkops, drugs, and poverty on a massive scale. Along with that, the confidence that the people have in the bosses’ politics has also been diminished. However, without a strong Party presence and revolutionary communism as a viable alternative, these workers will turn to inaction. In the face of all of that, determination of the working class in that city still survives.
The only solution is communist revolution
During the antiracist cookout, fighters who were formerly incarcerated, who led actions in prison and continue to be a source of support and leadership for men and women on both sides of the wall, spoke about the importance of solidarity. They discussed their personal experiences with the racist and sexist prison system, and how they felt these systems existed solely for the benefit of oppressing Black, Latin, and white workers.
More workers spoke about the need for people to be purposefully active and to engage with others to help fight back PLP highlighted that without an understanding of how racism and sexism is rooted in capitalism and class, and without multiracial unity in fighting locally and internationally, then we are giving the bosses space to continue to profit from our misery. Communist revolution under the leadership of PLP, not the bosses’ dead-end reforms, is what will free our class!
After the program ended, we spoke to people present about the PLP’s current work and history. We distributed CHALLENGE and sold our “Black and Red” t-shirts, which feature the pictures of known Black communists in the U.S. We got contacts of those who expressed interest in learning more about PLP.
As always, PLP must continue to be steeped in the mass movement. We build relationships with other members of our class, connecting our various struggles to the failures of capitalism, and the need for communist revolution.
We must continue to put forward communist ideas. Not doing this leaves the working class open to bad politics from reformist groups, or even worse, without a political analysis to tie together these capitalist abuses.
Black workers lead the way
After the cookout, PL’ers joined the family and friends of Rashad Cunningham, and the families of other slain youth—15-year-old Kemonte Cobbs and 38-year-old Thomas Watkins—in a protest at the Gary police station (see photo). Rashad’s two friends who were in the car with him were brutally beaten. His family has yet to receive as much as a statement from the police as to why their family member was killed.
The protesters marched around the station and told their own stories of abuses at the hands of these brutal cops. There are no answers for these families or justice under capitalism. These cops function to terrorize the working class. The only solution is to ultimately dismantle capitalist state power, and to build a world run by workers for workers using communist ideology. Under communism, the police will be abolished. The working class will solve its own problems through the collective.
Until then, we must fight back together as a class and build class-consciousness. We must take advantage of every chance the bosses and their agents leave for us to learn and grow in our revolutionary politics. We must put forward communist politics lead these working-class struggles because the lives of our class depend on it. Fight Back!
