CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, July 8—Fifteen hundred anti-racists militantly confronted the KKK
today, shouting powerful chants that forced them to shut down their racist rally. PLP and members of the Seven Hills Progressive Society from Lynchburg Virginia joined this multiracial rally of workers and students. As usual, the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists, deploying around 200 kkkops in riot gear to attempt to hold back the anti-racist counter-protesters. This exercise of state power was a reminder that racism is critical to the life of their capitalist system.
Chased the Klan Away
The group of about 50 Klansmen, some in their traditional white robes, came to Charlottesville to oppose the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, a leading figure of the pro-slavery U.S. Confederacy. They were escorted in by the kkkops, who had been sent to “protect members of the Ku Klux Klan from counterprotesters” (New York Times, 7/8). They were quickly drowned out by the chants of the demonstrators. PL’ers joined antiracist chants, and many demonstrators took CHALLENGE, vowing to continue the struggle against racism and the KKK. In just under an hour the Klan members finally slunk away. The antiracists refused to let the Klan go quietly, and chased after them, fiercely chanting. The riot cops viciously responded by attacking the anti-racist demonstrators with tear gas and 22 arrests.
State Terror Unleased on Antiracist Protesters
It’s no surprise that the bosses used their cops to attack antiracists, but protect the KKK instead. Since the founding of this country racism was used to justify slavery, the system Robert E. Lee fought to defend. Numerous local, state and federal laws passed over centuries were required to
entrench racist divisions inside the working class, and weaken our ability to fight back against our exploitation. The most vicious state terror was used by police on working people who insisted on struggling together against exploitation (see Lerone Bennett’s “Road Not Taken” on the lynch law of colonial era as well as the Hollywood film “Free State of Jones” on the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War.)
The kkkops brought out against the antiracists today functioned in this capitalist tradition when they attacked us. As the PLP chant goes: “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan: all are part of the bosses’ plan.”
In fact, the mayor of Charlottesville, Mike Signer, called on residents to stay away from the rally, as if nonviolence defeated the Confederacy. He tried to encourage workers to attend alternate events orchestrated by NAACP misleaders. Whenever the KKK or Nazis rear their ugly head, liberal misleaders and churches do their best to keep people from fighting back.
Signer’s pleas to ignore gutter racism clearly didn’t stop these 1,500 fighters that boldly showed up. One anti-Klan protester said that she wanted to come “because I believe that if you just stay
silent, nothing gets done” (npr.org, 7/9). When the Klan is confronted by multiracial fightback, they are terrified. PLP has a long history of beating them back and driving them out of our streets.
When the working class rejects passivity and organizes multiracial fightback against gutter racists like these, and the racism of this system, we are training for when we will need to defeat the capitalists for good.
The militancy of these 1,500 antiracists shows the potential of the working class to win. Turning the fight against racism, sexism, and nationalism into an international fight for a working-class run society—communism—is the only way to once and for all smash the horrors of this racist and sexist capitalist system.
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Chicago Mayor’s Racism Grad Plan Props Up Wider War & Growing Fascism
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- 13 July 2017 34 hits
Barack Obama’s best buddy Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has once again proven himself equal to his buddy in the task of generating ever-new ways of attacking Black youth in this city. Workers here will never forget his sixteen month cover-up of the police murder of sixteen year old Laquan McDonald. Now Emmanuel is trying to pass off a thinly veiled stratagy to bolster U.S. troop levels in an era of widening war as an act of “compassion” for the mainly Black youth of Chicago.
Racist Rahm has cooked up this insidious operation by intrroducing new high school graduation requirements for Chicago Public Schools. Starting with the class of 2020, students who have completed all academic requirements to graduate will not receive a diploma without a “post graduation plan”: seniors must certify they have a college acceptance, a job, a “gap year” (a year off before starting college), a job training program, or have joined the military in order to finish high school.
The finely tuned gradations for “worthiness” inherent in Emmanuel’s multi-track proposal leave unspoken the fate of the many tens of thousands of students who the schools and overburdened counselors will inevitably fail. As scores of students suffer a widespread unemployment crisis with its attendant gang activity, gun violence, police repression and mass incarceration.
The unemployment rate for Chicago youth between the ages of 20-24 is a staggering 47 percent for Black men and 20 percent for Latin men. Black and Latin students make up 84 percent of CPS (Chicago Tribune, 1/17). Due to the racism inseparable from capitalism students who cannot get into college and cannot find work are more likely to be Black and Latin. Such a requirement is a covert attempt to push many of these youth into the bloody hands of the U.S. military.
A hallmark of fascism is winning workers to viewing some portion of our class as good, worthy and productive members of society, and others as hindrances, and a drag on the potential of the nation, and ultimately as expendable. This dynamic is the essence of Trump’s infamous “Muslim ban” or the debates over the “Dreamer” immigration scheme. In each case the capitalist state is expanding agreement with scrutinizing and terrorizing entire populations and branding entire segments as unworthy and stripping them of any pretense of “rights.”
As the drive towards war intensifies, the rulers need our young people to be “military ready”. The Council on Foreign Relations, a ruling class think tank, made this clear in a 2012 report on military preparedness written by former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor to George W. Bush. That report promoted “Common Core Standards” as a way to academically prepare more young people for today’s military, redoubled expansion of STEM programs to produce the engineers and technically proficient soldiers required in today’s heavily computerized military and even more exposure to foreign languages to facilitate communication with the peoples of far off lands US imperialism seeks to dominate.
The bosses’ military has deep roots in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), with six military high schools: three for the Army and one each specializing in training for the Navy, Marines, and the Air Force. More than 9000 students, predominately Black and Latin, are enrolled in Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp (JROTC), where half of the drill-sergeant/teacher salaries are paid by the Armed Forces. For schools suffering from years of racist budget cuts JROTC is less a choice than a necessity. Emmanuel is leading the charge in preparing Black and Latino youth to die or get wounded fighting for the bosses’ profits. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Army soldiers were almost twice as likely to be injured or killed, compared to other military forces. In CPS, 80% of students in JROTC are in Army programs (Chicago Reporter, 1/14).
PLP’s recently concluded summer project was a glimpse of a readiness program for youth that couldn’t be more different from racist Rahm’s. We are making ourselves ready to organize revolution and lead a worker-run communist society. Over the course of a week our intergenerational, multiracial and gender-diverse collective pushed our limits. We organized demonstrations, reached out to workers in the transit, health care, steel and temp sectors. We examined capitalism’s inherent exploitative nature in study groups and explored our communist alternative in theory and in practice. Peers from other cities joined Chicago youth across the U.S. in playing a leading role in this project (see page 6). As the bosses’ war plans gather momentum, PLP is building internationalist class consciousness among workers and youth. We do that so that in coming wars soldiers will do as they have in the past and turn the guns on their class enemies instead of their working class brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. They will be part of rebuilding a new communist world “from the ashes of the old.”
Healthcare and Congress’ alternative to the (Un)Affordable Care Act is a hot topic. People all over the U.S. have been fighting back on these possible health care cuts. On this date there was a rally held in Indianapolis, Indiana to confront Senator Todd. Todd, and the ruling class are proposing cutting Medicaid, which will have a deadly effect on people with disabilities. The racist cuts will also hit Black workers heavily. Twenty-eight percent of adult Black workers under 65 depend on Medicaid. At the demonstration, cops showed no mercy to workers with disabilities as they stole phones to erase evidence and assaulted others—sending one person to the hospital.
ADAPT, a disability rights organization, asked its members to engage with politicians about the deadly affect this could have.
The ruling class will do anything to promote the idea that workers are just another commodity. When profits are main concern, workers with disabilities are seen as people who can’t carry their weight in society (i.e. pad the bosses pockets) and do not deserve handouts. The bosses will turn right around and give the same vicious treatment to any member of the working class who dare oppose their tyranny.
Too often, not enough comrades are present to build among the people to put their bodies on the line to oppose the bosses’ greed. The working class has to be present, active, and able to organize with lack of accessibility. If we fellow workers do not show up to these struggles, we leave our comrades with disabilities behind with dead-end reformist lines. We as workers can not afford to undervalue the leadership that workers with disabilities can bring to our ranks. Our fight for a communist world is one that seeks the end of the mistreatment of workers with disabilities by developing all of us into leaders of communist revolution.
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Colombia Construction Workers Halt Bosses’ Production
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- 13 July 2017 32 hits
COLOMBIA—In response to the delay in payment of salaries, 60 angry and courageous construction workers went on strike several months ago, demanding to get back stolen pay. Members of Progressive Labor Party have been working with these workers for more than a year, distributing the paper, discussing the situation of the working class, wage slavery and dialectical materialism. One member of PLP even participated in the activities by advising the workers and trying to prevent retaliations from the bosses.
In reaction to the strike, the bosses brought workers from other sites to sabotage the strike. The bosses tried to convince workers that he wasn’t responsible for the scabs and that “other factors” brought them in. Disgusted at his lies, the workers refused to believe him. They intensified their struggle by blocking the entrance to the site, not even letting in supplies. The member of PLP involved tried to protect workers from the bosses’ retaliation. Despite best efforts, the desperate bosses fired ten workers.
Lessons from the Strike
During the evaluation after the strike, we discussed the lessons of this action with the workers. We asked them why they didn’t take into account that the bosses might retaliate and fire workers. They responded that they did not think the bosses would respond so harshly when workers were simply demanding their hard-earned salaries. In reality, the bosses don’t care about stealing from workers. Bosses already steal from workers in order to make profits. The wages any workers receive are nothing compared to the profits that workers create for the bosses. Bosses are crooks by nature, so we can’t trust them to be nice when workers fight back.
We concluded that workers cannot trust capitalist laws, which were made to justify private property, not to defend working-class needs. We also cannot trust in pacifism, because the bosses will use violence whenever they need to in order to keep workers in line. We have to learn from this valuable experience and be more organized next time. Spontaneity cannot replace leadership and organization. We are still debating with six workers and circulating CHALLENGE at this site.
Whole Damn System Has Got to Go
While workers struggle to get paid their meager wages, Colombia’s productive sector is generating multimillions in profits due to the surge in construction and mining. None of those profits go to enrich the working class. They are going straight to the thick bank accounts of the bosses and rulers. Still worse, the bosses’ filthy mines ruin working-class neighborhoods. A UN report found that mining has taken severe tolls on “access to water, health, [and the] development of agricultural activity” and “a high rate of prostitution also occurs among young people, including high school students, and drug addiction, mainly among men” in towns where mines are created.
The Colombian government also doesn’t care about the workers affected by the expanding mining industry, most of whom come from the poorest parts of the country. President Juan Manuel Santos made mining one of the “motors” of his “Prosperity for All” economic policy, code for “Prosperity for All Capitalists.” The government is on the capitalists’ side, not the workers’.
As long as the capitalist system exists, labor accidents, premature deaths, wage theft and mass firings will continue to be an everydayoccurrence. The greedy ruling class has profited off workers’ misery and low salaries. This worksite where there are 160 workers working tirelessly for 60 hours a week is just one example of how the bosses make a profit. It is the job of PLP to organize with workers and raise revolutionary consciousness. Strikes are an important stepping stone in building working class confidence, but we must not stop there. We must abolish the entire capitalist system so that we can win working-class power.
PLP must keep building with workers in all industries and all countries, from construction workers in Colombia to transit workers in Chicago, so that we can build a revolutionary outlook amongst the international working class. We must organize so all of our actions are planned, taking into account our daily experiences, the conscience level and organization of the masses, the strength of the enemy, and our own strength.We can advance with confidence. We must make our revolutionary Party massive, as a necessary step for the communist revolution that will end the vileness of this criminal, racist, capitalist
system.
The U.S. bosses are contemplating another imperialist war on the Korean peninsula. Like all imperialists they don’t want the international working class knowing the real history of Korea. Like all imperialists they are terrified that if the workers in the U.S. and Korea knew about the “forgotten” Korean War, the workers would unite, turn the guns around, and shoot this imperialist system down.
Jeju. Koje. No Gun Ri. Daejeon. Sinchon. These are the names of some places in present-day North Korea that the international working class must never forget, alongside countless others where workers said “enough” to imperialist war and fought back.
Part of fighting to keep the memory and history of the working class of Korea alive is understanding how there came to be a “North” and “South” Korea in the first place.
Korea: From Feudalism to Fascism to Socialism
The Korean peninsula was a largely feudal kingdom until Japanese imperialists invaded in 1910. Korean workers and peasants were considered subhuman to the Japanese fascists. Japanese fascism meant Korean men grew food for the army in slave-like conditions, and Korean women were forced into sex slavery.
On August 15, 1945, the communist-led Soviet Red Army liberated the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. imperialists had just dropped atomic bombs on their Japanese imperialist rivals, and threatened the Red Army if they moved south.
What became “North” Korea literally changed overnight. On day one:
- “People’s Committees” led by women and youth, accountable to mass meetings in every village, were the new government.
- Landlords were arrested or driven out.
- Japanese fascist soldiers, police, Japanese-trained Korean police, government officials, and collaborators were thrown into their own prisons.
- All forms of sex slavery were abolished.
- Education, healthcare, childcare, housing, transportation, clothing, meaningful employment, leisure, access to culture, freedom of choice in relationships and marriage were guaranteed to all workers.
- Over the next several years, workers in the North built the foundations of socialism, modeled on the then-socialist Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, U.S. bosses kept the Japanese fascists in power in what became South Korea. They maintained every aspect of Japanese rule, including sex slavery, and opened segregated brothels for the U.S. military.
U.S. Imperialists Respond with Massacre
When workers in the South learned about the advances in the North through the Communist Party, they formed their own People’s Committees and rebelled. On Jeju island, an estimated 80 percent of the island’s 300,000 workers were communists, and in 1948 a rebellion erupted against the U.S. occupation. The U.S. burned the entire island in response.
Massacres like this occurred with greater frequency and desperation under U.S. imperialism. With a taste of workers’ power in the North, the working class refused to submit and dared to resist.
In 1950, the U.S. finally attempted outright invasion of the North. Demonstrations supporting the North erupted worldwide. The monstrous Korean war raged for three years and claimed millions of workers’ lives. The workers fought on—even under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the U.S. bosses—and showed the world the meaning of mass bravery.
Workers’ power was later reversed in North Korea, and PLP has analyzed the failures of socialism elsewhere.
The U.S. bosses call Korea “The Forgotten War” precisely because they hope it will be forgotten. But the working class of Korea will never be forgotten. PLP aspires to the legacy of the Korean workers’ commitment to revolution. Deserving that legacy means fighting onward to the final victory of communism. Our victory will be their vengeance.