New York City, February 12—Students, parents and teachers united at a Brooklyn high school to call out the racist Department of Education (DoE) after they tried to cover up a dangerously slow response to a gas leak. For over an hour, gas leaked from a pipe in the stairwell before DOE officials evacuated the mainly Black school. Many could have died, and this dangerous fact showed the school community that the racist, capitalist education bosses really don’t care about our lives!
School administrators listened to the advice of one of the DOE’s higher-ups, to not evacuate, believing that it might be the custodians refueling snow plowers. Despite common sense and known protocol to evacuate and then investigate when there is a strong gas smell, staff and students were held inside classrooms and told to open windows when staff and students reported feeling ill.
Workers’ instincts vs reliance on the bosses
Our school community followed orders, erroneously putting faith in the racist school bosses instead of following our instinct to protect each other and evacuating immediately. Many agree that the lesson to be drawn is to not trust the bosses by blindly following orders. Staff promised that next time, they would evacuate their students regardless of what the bosses say. This racist attack, as many students and parents correctly noted, would not have occurred if the students were non working class and non-white.
To add insult to injury, when we were finally evacuated, school safety (run by the NYPD) told us not to cross the street or evacuate to a nearby school, putting us once again in harm’s way. Fortunately this time, staff smartened up and decided to take matters into their own hands. Many staff started blocking traffic themselves so that our population of approximately 1,500 students could cross to safety. One staff member was bumped by a car as he tried to stop oncoming traffic. It became very clear that workers’ instinct to protect our kids, not reliance on the bosses’ expertise was what was going to keep students safe.Despite this extremely dangerous situation, there was no sign of NYPD at the evacuation scene. One parent later pointed out how a few months ago, 11 cop cars and vans had rushed to the school to intimidate a group of about 100 parents and students peacefully protesting the removal of three respected and loved football coaches, but were nowhere to be seen when they were needed to protect our students. This was another lesson for the school community. The primary role of the police is to protect this racist, unequal system, not to protect the working class.
When the building was finally deemed safe by the fire department, the DOE stooges once again managed to turn re-entering the school into another dangerous situation. Instead of following usual protocol to reenter the building using three separate entrances to expedite the process, only one entrance was used; keeping these young people, some without coats, outside in the snow for almost an extra hour.
In keeping with a long-standing and damaging racist culture of over-policing and scanning Black youth, hundreds of students waited on the slippery steps in the snow and hail to be scanned. Two students were taken by Emergency Medical Services due to asthma/panic attacks as the situation unfolded.
Parent-student-worker unity
Students, staff, and parents outraged at the handling of this situation, organized to demand answers. The three staff union chapters met to discuss next steps, including how to act in a future situation and organizing a political response. An angry letter calling out the DOE’s racism and lack of care for students and staff was drafted, approved, and sent to the mayor and the school’s chancellor.
This was the first time in almost a decade that all three union chapters met together, which was a step towards fighting the alienation between staff that has been created with the small schools movement. There was some struggle over fighting backward anti-parent and anti-student ideas amongst campus staff. Some teachers felt parents and students would not be willing to or even capable of organizing a response. Yet these teachers were proven wrong when several parents wrote scathing letters, came up to school to question why their children’s lives were not taken seriously, and boldly spoke up at a “safety” meeting organized by the school administration.
When DOE representatives tried to blame staff’s lack of training in emergency situations for what happened, parents and teachers openly called out the DOE for trying to cover up their racist disregard for students’ safety. An alliance between parents, students, and staff is essential to defeating the racist bosses. The bosses intentionally try to divide us and when we unite, it strikes fear in the bosses.
The lesson of the day was that students, staff, and parents need to rely on each other and not the bosses to ensure our survival. We don’t need the bosses, and trusting them could prove deadly.
CHICAGO, March 1—Over 80 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades and friends celebrated our second annual Black and Red Dinner on the city’s South Side this evening. Through a variety of different games, performances, and speeches, the multiracial, multi-generational audience was able to learn more about the vital contributions of Black communists to the struggle against racist capitalism.
But far from being just a history lesson, the event stressed the present reality of the Black working class remaining a key revolutionary force on an international level. Those sections of the working class most oppressed and exploited by capitalism have always had some of the highest stakes in seeing this rotten profit system destroyed. By emphasizing their militancy and leadership as a part of a mass PLP, the prospects for communist revolution become bright!
Revolutionary history and struggle come alive
The event kicked off with a historical scavenger hunt. Posted at various points around the room were pictures and stories of Black communist leaders and the struggles they were involved in. Participants paired up in teams in order to answer trivia questions. Following this, a young Black worker shook the audience with a fiery and creative remix of Black communist poet Langston Hughes’ Good Morning, Revolution. Later in the program we saw two talented young Black women perform their own rap verses and spoken word that challenged the widespread alienation, violence, and sexism that saturate the capitalist system.
Black PLP comrades also gave speeches about the process that led them to become communists, and specifically what it means for them to be communists in PLP. They highlighted the importance of criticism and self-criticism, multi-racial working-class unity, internationalism, and anti-racist fightback, including the need for revolutionary violence, as primary themes in the struggle for communism and workers’ power.
The event was capped off with a keynote speech by a Party high school teacher, who emphasized the PLP line of Black workers being a key revolutionary force. In front of a few dozen of her mostly Black and Latin students, she explained the process by which the racism created by the U.S. bosses during the colonial period was soon exported around the world with the rise of capitalism. But even as racist oppression and exploitation rose internationally, she highlighted the never-ending fightback of workers of color, a fightback that continues to educate and inspire to the present day.
Communism and anti-racism go hand-in-hand
The idea for a Black and Red event came from comrades’ experiences within the mass movement, where among many Black activists there can be a strong attitude of incompatibility between struggles against racism and the fight for communist revolution. The revolutionary politics of communism often get incorrectly lumped into the category of an overwhelmingly white and male ideology.
The reality couldn’t be farther from it. In the wake of the October Revolution of 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party seized power from the Russian bosses and created the first workers’ state in history, the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism was applied to workers’ struggles against racism and imperialism in countries as diverse as Haiti, Mexico, Ethiopia, and South Africa. Workers from these countries and beyond were able to harness a communist class analysis and strategy to wage a more effective struggle against the bosses’ racism and exploitation.
What’s more, communist leadership in building a mass anti-racist campaign in defense of the Scottsboro boys in the 1930s, (a case in which nine Black youth were unjustly charged with the raping two white women). Black workers were at the forefront of unemployment and anti-eviction councils during the Great Depression. They were also instrumental defeating the vile Nazis and their fascist “master race” ideology during World War II. All these actions and more reinforced the fact that a struggle for communism was a struggle against racism.
To this end, many Black leaders became committed communists. Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. DuBois, Claudia Jones and many others recognized and fought for an egalitarian communist society as the only means to eradicate the scourge of racism from the earth.
The racist capitalist bosses and their bourgeois historians have worked hard to erase this history of multi-racial communist unity and struggle, precisely because it directly challenges their ability to divide workers based on race, exploit certain groups at a higher rate than others, and maintain their class power.
Communism will triumph through Black leadership
But despite the bosses’ best efforts, they won’t succeed in erasing the essential leadership of Black workers to the revolutionary communist struggle. Events like the Black and Red Dinner are important to counter their watering down of our history while educating and inspiring the current generation of a multi-racial working class movement.
W.E.B. DuBois is quoted as saying, “In the end, communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.” Then, as now, understanding and promoting the importance of Black communist leadership will bring our collective liberation all the sooner.
Haiti, March 3—It’s been close to a month since the first uprising of 2019 with masses of working class people rising up against the capitalist system. Recalling a history of the first Black people to successfully fight back against capitalist slavery and colonialism (1804 Haitian Revolution), today, in the streets and through social media, workers and students call for an end to a system of inequality. For several days, starting on February 7, the anniversary of the fall of the hated Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, to February 18, a series of mobilizations shut everything down: roads were barricaded, no transport moved, businesses closed. An estimated two million people in every corner from big cities to small “sections rurales” (hamlets) were in the streets.
The demands, at heart, were anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, calling out in particular France and the U.S. who are responsible for the impoverishment of the masses through their economic and political stranglehold of the country. The demonstrators called for the departure of politicians in power, for jobs and better living conditions, and jail for those who stole from the masses in the PetroCaribe gasoline scandal. It is more and more clear that the whole damn capitalist system has to go. The working class needs communism.
Let us not imply that we are on the cusp of revolution here. There are many in the mass movement who just don’t really get it. In one demonstration, video cameras caught numbers of young people shouting, “Putin yes, U.S.A. no!” The enemy of our enemy is not our friend! Capitalists are always in competition with one another to gain more power for themselves; their rivalry is always at the expense of the workers. In some social media posts, there was a calling out and mocking of those who think they are part of the middle class, noting they supported the class in power even though they themselves didn’t have a working toilet or drove a tenth-hand car. There is a lot of opportunism inside the movement, “what’s in it for me?” This way of thinking is promoted by the bourgeoisie because it divides our movement. It will be stamped out as revolutionary class consciousness grows among the masses and the Progressive Labor Party(PLP) grows in influence. Our goal is to lead class struggle and lead the working class to seize state power and establish a communist egalitarian system.
In general, working people here are fed up with misery. During an agitational rally organized by the Party in a provincial city we got a very positive response. In a public market, both vendors and shoppers shouted, “We can’t continue like this, life is too expensive, we can’t feed our children, this has to change!”
Thanks to these mobilizations, PLP has yet another opportunity to struggle around the necessity for communist revolution as the only way to end exploitation and misery. People are becoming more class conscious, more interested in knowing who the ruling class is and how they work. In fact, many people are using social media to circulate the names, the companies, the fields of activities, the political implications and the history of the small group of bourgeois who “keep us in the misery, who starve us as they get fat,” as the demonstrators say.
In the working class areas, people are regaining confidence in their ability to defeat the system. Witness the cancellation of most carnival celebrations. The people are saying, “no, we will not dance as garbage fills the streets, because we are hungry, we will not dance on the blood of those murdered in the struggle, we will not dance when there are no hospitals to receive our sick and wounded, let alone with a corrupt president in power.”
Our Party invites you to take part in advancing class struggle everywhere to end capitalism and to establish communism. March with us on May Day 2019 and put another nail in the bosses’ coffin!
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Refugees from Venezuela face racist & sexist misery
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- 09 March 2019 208 hits
COLOMBIA—The capitalists’ strategy, based on sexism, individualism, nationalism, racism —basically everything that can keep us divided and oppressed—is manifested in our daily life. Without realizing it, we fall into this trap by taking positions that delay the revolutionary struggle for a better world. In the case of racism, it manifests itself in many workers from Colombia, who, forgetting their miserable situation, look and speak contemptuously of workers from Venezuela who have immigrated to Colombia these days.
Sexism and racism are manifested in frequent comments to these proletarians, blaming them for the current wave of crime, insecurity, and prostitution, as well as lowering wages and stealing work. In the place where I work, I have discussed issues with my coworkers, making them see that in the past many workers from Colombia immigrated to Venezuela, trying to escape from the bosses’ war and seeking to improve their economic situation and but returning empty-handed, just like that many who have sought the “American dream,” only to suffer from wage slavery and racist oppression. Therefore, capitalism keeps us fleeing and trying to escape from its prison by looking for “better bosses.”There are also conscious comrades who state that nationalism only serves the capitalist politicians, who use it to divide and exploit us, and that only uniting with the working class and promoting proletarian internationalism can help us improve our situation. It is our duty to support ourselves without looking at nationality. But it is essential that this international working-class unity is politically oriented to fight against our class enemies, the capitalists all over the world.
For that, it’s necessary to spread the revolutionary politics of Progressive Labor Party and its newspaper CHALLENGE, as an ideological weapon that allows us to initiate the struggle in an organized way, for the destruction of warmongering, oppression, and unnatural imperialism, and the building of communism. Communism is our most natural way of living in a dignified manner, away from all the capitalist scourges, economic crises, and onslaught against workers. Fights against the bosses by the workers give us great opportunities to unite to defeat nationalism, racism, sexism, and individualism as we build an international working-class base for communist revolution.
BROOKLYN, NY March 1— As the 274,000 students and 29,000 faculty and staff across the City University of New York (CUNY) were on winter break, thousands of custodians, custodial assistants, laborers and mechanics who make the students’ learning conditions possible continued working in intolerable working conditions.
New York State and the CUNY bosses claim there’s no money to improve either learning or working conditions. That’s capitalism for you: no money for education but plenty for corporate welfare. And it’s not just Amazon, many corporations get tax breaks and there’s lots of money for prisons.
At Kingsborough Community College (KCC) the fightback is growing. Strong relationships, CHALLENGE networks, and increasingly politicized friendships among multiracial, immigrant and native-born students, workers and faculty offer a glimpse of a united working class with a communist understanding that capitalism is not working for workers and students. We need a revolution!
Contingent vs. full-time: divide and conquer
Among faculty, the bosses have reduced full timers to 40 percent; the rest are adjunct faculty. Adjuncts are hired on a temporary, on-demand basis without the pay, benefits, or job security of tenured faculty (see CHALLENGE, 12/19/18).
At the same time, the bosses made a similar attack on campus workers, with even more devastating and racist results. Years ago, KCC began hiring custodial staff under the job title of “custodial assistants,” not full custodians, so they could pay them less. Then they limited their hours to just under the minimum threshold of 37.5 per week to prevent them from reaching full-time status with full benefits.
Custodial assistants make $16 per hour; full custodians make around $20 per hour. According to a recent study, on a single income, wages in New York City must be at least $29.96 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment, and $34.40/ hour to rent the more common two-bedroom, with similar numbers for New Jersey (NBC New York, 6/18/18). At $16 per hour, custodial assistants must work about 93 hours a week, all 52-weeks to cover rent and basic expenses. At $20/hour, they still must work 74 hours a week, nearly two full-time jobs. But again, KCC workers are prevented from ever reaching full-time status. And so workers suffer, facilities like bathrooms flood daily and buildings literally crumble around the students.
Union misleaders keep the bosses’ peace
Every day, KCC bosses order the custodial assistants to work outside of their title to perform the necessary duties of higher paid, full custodians. Workers who complain to their union District Council 37 (DC37) representatives are told to not be insubordinate, to follow bosses’ orders, and grieve it later. Grievances take time to file and don’t go anywhere. Workers don’t even bother–they know the union is on the side of the bosses. The union only notices them during elections to “get out the vote” for Democrats.
As budget shortfalls hit KCC last year, more than one-third of the custodial staff either retired or quit. Workers had to speed up and work extra details, and DC 37 did nothing. This year, the new custodial assistants being hired are exploited even more, working even fewer hours, and facing summary termination.
When communists led unions they were militant, fighting organizations, much more than today. But whether then or now, the bosses constantly grind us down, taking away our hard fought victories. As we fight for better pay for adjuncts ($7K per class) or better conditions for custodians, join the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in fighting for a communist world.
Organize, strike, revolt
At KCC the new third wave of even more highly exploited custodians follows increasing numbers of “Continuing Ed Teachers” (CETs) among faculty who teach vital (and profitable) programs such as ESL. While they are members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union, they are barred from using facilities like the KCC library and gym, and are paid even worse than the adjuncts. Under capitalism the drive to lower wages everywhere is relentless. At KCC, our growing relationships among groups of students, faculty and workers and the antiracist struggles are gradually changing the atmosphere, and some workers feel freer to express solidarity and voice their own grievances. KCC custodial and cafeteria workers, students and adjuncts,CET faculty, and PLer’s are all part of the working class, and are struggling against the same enemy to strengthen working class unity.
PLP supports the adjunct organizing around the demand for $7,000 per class or strike. The strike is a powerful weapon, as workers from Chicago to India keep proving. Whether students succeed in organizing to terminate racist administrators, or adjuncts succeed in organizing a CUNY-wide strike around 7K for adjuncts, we win by fighting now to make our lives better and fighting over the long haul for a better worl–communism.
Armed with communist ideas and CHALLENGE, let’s recruit many more workers and students worldwide into an army to smash racism, sexism, and imperialism once and for all with communist revolution. This spring semester, class struggle is back in session.
