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Black & RED, Untold History part IV: THE HARLEM REBELLION
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- 30 June 2017 50 hits
Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to find out more.
Part II explored how the international communist movement was the imeptus of the civil rights movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College. Part III covered the class contradictions of Martin Luther King, Jr., influenced by the Communist Party.
Part IV takes a look at the Harlem Rebellion and its communist influence.
The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 shook the United States bosses and resonated around the world as the struggle against racism expanded from the fight against Jim Crow in the South to the cities of the North. Once again the communist movement helped lead and was deeply influenced by the fight against racism in the U.S.
The rebellion, sparked by the police killing a young Black man in cold blood, occurred at a moment when the working class around the world was rising up, led by the communist movement centered around the Chinese Communist Party. The fledgling Progressive Labor Movement born out of the rise of the working class in China, was also shaped by the Harlem Rebellion.
In July 1964, 15 year-old James Powell was playing with friends on the sidewalk across from his school in the white neighborhood of Yorkville, when a building superintendent sprayed them down with a hose and unleashed a series of racial epithets at the Black children. The school kids ran at the super to get him to stop, and a cop, Thomas Gilligan, watching from across the street came at the group and shot James Powell in front of numerous witnesses.
Immediately about 300 Black students from the school rallied at the site of the murder and confronted the police on the scene demanding Gilligan’s arrest and inspiring the rebellion.
It began outside the walls of a Harlem police station, days after Lt. Thomas Gilligan, a white, off-duty police officer, shot and killed a 15-year-old African-American student named James Powell on July 16. Two days of peaceful protests ensued. But on the third day, a crowd surrounded the police precinct, calling for Gilligan’s arrest, and was met with swinging clubs of the New York Police Department, under a rainfall of glass bottles and garbage can lids thrown by residents from rooftops above. Gunfire broke out after police pushed thousands of demonstrators back a few blocks toward the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue” (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).
The rebellion started only weeks after the U.S. had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which was Lyndon Johnson’s response to the growing Civil Rights Movement in the South. That movement and the world-wide movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was politicizing the working class. The working class in China, had been victimized by the brutality of British, Japanese and U.S. imperialism. The history of imperialism was inseparable from the racist theories of the British ruling class. The victory of the working class in China inspired workers all over the world to rise up against imperialism and sharpened the struggle against racism. In Vietnam, the working class was in the process of defeating the largest imperialist power the world had ever seen, the war machine of the U.S. bosses. In the U.S., even as legal segregation and racism was being brought down in the South, Black workers in the North were taking on the imbedded racism of liberal capitalism.
The overwhelming majority of black New Yorkers saw their quality of life decline, whether it’s school segregation, housing segregation, unemployment, earnings… [in the] period between the end of World War II and the 1964 riot… “This was Northern racism, which was quite different from Southern racism, in that Northern racism was covert,” says Joseph Boskin, history professor emeritus at Boston University.
Boskin, who conducted interviews in Harlem after the [rebellion], says the unmet expectations of Black Americans in the North were starting to push some of them toward more militant routes for change, despite a national narrative of what seemed to be progress in the country’s laws” (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).
The Progressive Labor Movement, the young forerunner to PLP, grew out of the rebellion and played a leading role at the same time. PLM produced a poster, ‘Wanted for Murder - Gilligan the Cop” that became the banner of the struggle carried by thousands of people in the streets. The PLM organized marches and rallies even after the NYC bosses tried to ban all political activity.
The ruling class in New York, who thought of themselves as the “decent” bosses compared to the Jim Crow Southern capitalists, were caught off-guard by the anger of Black workers in Harlem who suffered under extreme inequality.
The Harlem median family income was $3,995 compared to …$6,100 [for NYC], that unemployment in Harlem was 300% higher than in the rest of the city, that sub-standard housing was 49% while in the rest of NYC it was 15%, that infant mortality was 45.3 per 1000 births but only 26.3 in the rest of the city…Life magazine lamented that “the only force that had the guts to give political direction to the spontaneous rebellion was PL.” (Progressive Labor, Vol. 10, No. 1, August-September 1975)
The Harlem Rebellion exposed racism as part of capitalism, even in U.S.’s most liberal center, NYC. After Harlem, within weeks, rebellions broke out in Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago and Philadelphia and over the next few years there were major rebellions in Watts (1965), Newark (1967) and Detroit (1967). Then in 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, rebellions broke out in cities across the country and workers and students around the world, most notably in France and Chicago shook capitalism.
The ruling class has tried to write off the rebellions by calling them riots and dismissing the contribution and courage of the tens of thousands of Black workers who were part of the movement. But even now, 50 years later, the truth of the Harlem Rebellion has not been erased.
Part of the problem is that in the North, many of the laws were not openly discriminatory,…It made it harder to seize the moral high ground and argue that nonviolent civil disobedience was justified.
So, growing frustrations found an outlet on the streets, according to Billy Mitchell, historian of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
“It wasn’t just people just wildin’ out, you know, and just going crazy. They understood what they were doing,”…
Looking back, Mitchell says he doesn’t completely condone the violent response. But he says it was necessary.
“Sometimes you have got to really do something extraordinary or uncommon to get the attention of people,” he adds.
(In the Heat of the Summer: The Harlem Riot of 1964 and the Road to America’s Prison Crisis).
The U.S. ruling class responded to the mass demonstrations and anti-imperialist movements with both terror and political crumbs. Police and soldiers fired on and killed civil rights demonstrators and students fighting racism and war in Orangeburg, SC, Jackson State, MS and Kent State, OH (see CHALLENGE, 6/28).
Combined with the brutal attacks, the ruling class enacted a series of reforms in cities with concentrations of Black workers. Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty funneling millions of dollars to create community programs. The Democratic Party and northern capitalists spent millions getting Black mayors elected across the country.
The FBI revved up its Cointelpro Program. A covert operation to target PLP and other groups to try to destroy the anti-imperialist movement. Leaders of PLP were arrested and some were convicted and jailed, others harassed and fired. Through those struggles and in the years since we’ve tried to keep up the fight against racism and build an integrated organization.
Black workers who have borne the brunt of racism and led the fight against it must be in the leadership of any working-class struggle and movement for communism. There will be no forward progress for the working class without the leadership of Black workers and a massive struggle against racism.
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Pakistan: Growing Chinese Imperialism Means More Misery for Millions of Workers
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- 30 June 2017 49 hits
PAKISTAN—The working class continues to be exploited viciously by the capitalist class here in Pakistan, and by growing Chinese imperialism. To divide the masses in the name of different nationalities, religion, religious sects and build allegiances to one or another celebrity political personality, the capitalist bosses shout over each other over minor issues to hide their unity with their brutal system.
This vicious exploitation goes hand-in-hand with the increasing importance of the working class of Pakistan’s labor to Chinese imperialism. In the midst of the sharpening attacks on the working class and sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry between the United States and China, the Progressive Labor Party here is growing too!
Communists Building Resistance in Pakistan
PLP is building among workers and students despite limited resources and difficult circumstances. PLP is involved in many activities here. Most recently, we played a key role to organize different activities for International Working Women’s Day and May Day.
We are involved in the mass workers’ and student movements, struggling to let the working class know that these so-called trade union “leaders” and politicians may appear to be opposed, but are on the same page to exploit the working class. This rotten capitalist system is the main cause of all these miseries of poor workers, and therefore we have to get rid of capitalism by building a communist movement under the red flag of an international communist PLP.
Workers Have No “Rights”
Pakistan has the ninth largest labor force in the world with 66 million workers. Less than two million workers are unionized in one of about 950 trade unions, because the majority of workers are denied the right to organize a union. Forty four percent of the entire workforce are in agriculture, cannot form a union, and are badly exploited. Twenty three percent of all workers are industrial workers, employed on an individual contract system with no rights to any benefits. Thirty four percent are engaged in services (excluding the military and police service) where there are some unions. Their so-called “leaders” are under the political control of the bosses and their politicians, and the bosses’ government threatens rank-and-file workers into paralysis with strict laws and regulations.
The working class here is deprived of all rights. There are no real labor laws. Women workers are desperately exploited, sexually abused, and tortured at workplaces. Workers do not receive the minimum wage which is supposedly mandated by the government. There is no healthcare, no old age benefit, no social welfare fund, no social security, no fixed working hours, no safety and security at workplaces.
The bosses’ corrupt political parties use the working class for their votes to get into government power, and are resorting to paying some money to unemployed workers to come to public meetings and chant in their favor or against their political opponents. It will help bosses to buy the votes of the poorest sectors of the working class, and if some poor workers are hesitant to sell out their votes, than they will be tortured to snatch them.
If workers try to organize a demonstration outside of these political parties, they can be fired, or declared terrorists according to the government’s latest “anti-terrorism” laws.
Imperialism is Terrorism for Workers
Workers bear the brunt of these so-called “anti-terrorism” laws, which are really about keeping the working class terrorized into submission as Pakistan’s bosses enrich themselves off of the workers’ labor, and sell it to the highest imperialist bidder.
Pakistan is a centerpiece of Chinese imperialism’s enormous, 65-nation “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) project to integrate Central Asia, Africa and Europe to China’s growing economy. Pakistan is strategic for its position connecting Central, East, and South Asia with the Middle East and the Arabian Sea. China has pledged $57 billion (U.S. dollars) to Pakistan’s bosses to build new factories, pipelines and shipping ports, like Gwadar. Pakistan, historically allied to U.S. imperialism, has been sparing no expense to impress their new imperialist masters in Beijing, including creating a new army division dedicated to protecting Chinese investments, and gunning down workers.
On Saturday, May 13, the same day China and Pakistan’s bosses signed another $500 million deal, ten construction workers were murdered by these soldiers, who were building roads linking remote towns to OBOR projects (Reuters, 5/13). The Pakistani government was supposedly “wary of Islamist militants” (Reuters).
The working class’ miseries are not discussed in the public meetings of different political parties, or even in the strikes sometimes organized by the trade unions. The fake “leadership” of these political parties and unions avoid explaining the causes of working-class deprivation because they avoid criticizing any of the capitalist bosses, or the capitalist system. They stick to begging the bosses for tiny increases in wages!
PLP is the only party which marches and strikes alongside the workers and students while exposing the real reasons behind the miseries of working class. Capitalism is making the lives of the entire international working class more difficult because the bosses need more profits, and we must organize ourselves against capitalism for international communist revolution!
The Cops, The Courts, The Taliban…
The capitalists and their parliament, administration, schools, courts, police and religious terrorists are all part of the capitalist system keeping Pakistan’s working class under brutal exploitation. The biggest bosses cut deals and allow extremist religious groups a share of the profits, while publicly claiming to be part of the “war on terror.”
Nowhere is this clearer than with the Taliban and other allied terrorist groups. Virtually every city in Pakistan is under the local control of these religious extremists, fascist paramilitaries and criminal mafias. In the rural areas, religious fascists treat themselves like feudal lords in not only outright exploitation and denial of basic education, but also in mandating and perpetuating sexist feudal-era customs to the extreme, playing games with workers’ lives and honor for amusement.
In these areas, the local bosses mandate men to murder women who refuse to marry them, or they seek a divorce from, and/or mandate “honor raping” against women as payment if someone in the woman’s family was found guilty of “dishonor.”
…All Are Part of the Bosses’ Plan!
The local religious bosses like the Taliban help the Pakistani bosses divide and conquer the working class, and try to condition women and men workers to accept their role as cheap wage-slaves for either U.S. or Chinese imperialism.
These sharpening political-economic attacks on the working class, on the other hand, reflect how vital Pakistan’s workers are to the growing inter-imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Chinese capitalists, and how desperately these bosses’ imperialist plans depend on the profits from our labor. A strong communist movement here can send shockwaves around the world.
PLP is growing stronger here every day because of our communist line and dedicated comrades. We are learning how our communist ideas can flourish in these difficult circumstances, and are bringing more workers into the Party!
As Progressive Labor Party prepares for our 2017 Summer Project in Chicago, the city’s working class is under intense attack. Decades of rule by the “lesser-evil” Democratic politicians have done nothing but make the political, social, and economic life of workers more unbearable, as shown by unprecedented numbers of Black families leaving the city (WGN, 6/22).
As always with capitalism, racist and sexist attacks are the tip of the spear in the drive to bring down the living conditions of all workers. More than ever, workers in Chicago and everywhere need PLP’s communist politics and organization as the only permanent path out of capitalism’s destruction and towards a working-class egalitarian world that meets our needs.
Gang Violence vs Economic Violence—The Real Criminals
The working class of Chicago has received a lot of media attention in recent years, the overwhelming majority of it negative. The bosses’ racist and sexist mouthpieces depict the city as a lawless warzone, with gang violence running unchecked in hyper-segregated west and south side neighborhoods. But this skewed perspective purposefully deflects attention and the proper blame away from the capitalists and their politicians, the criminals most directly responsible for the violence that workers face.
Far less noted in the bosses’ media is the fact that capitalism’s racist unemployment prevents at least 50 percent of Black youth between the ages of 20-24 from finding jobs in the city (Chicago Tribune, 1/25/16). Practically forgotten is how Obama and Clinton protégé Mayor Rahm Emanuel led the charge in 2013 to close 50 public schools—the majority in Black and Latin neighborhoods—in addition to closing half of the city’s mental health centers. For over three years, the bosses’ infighting has prevented a budget from being passed for the state of Illinois, shredding various social programs and destroying countless working-class lives.
A communist class-conscious outlook cuts through the hypocrisy and places blame on the bosses, exactly where it belongs. The poverty, desperation, and lack of opportunity inflicted on the working class by capitalism, which needs rising unemployment, a shredded safety net, and ultimately war to survive through its economic crises, is a violence that far outweighs that of any street gang. The communist society that PLP fights for would be the exact opposite: our needs and development as workers would be the primary goal. There’d simply be no reason to turn to drugs or reactionary violence in order to survive.
No KKKops, No Fake Councils, Only Workers’ Power
The bosses’ only consistent answer to address the class violence and inequality in the city has been to advocate for more of their own racist attack dogs. In September of 2016, Mayor Emanuel made his proposal to hire 1,000 more cops by 2018 (CNN, 9/21/16). A thousand kkkops just means a thousand more potential Jason Van Dykes (murderer of Laquan McDonald) or Dante Servins (murderer of Rekia Boyd) roaming the streets, terrorizing and murdering our working-class sisters and brothers. Chicago already has a relatively high proportion of cops compared to other cities. All it has led to is more bloodshed and a costly federal investigation regarding the rampant institutional racism of the police department (CPD).
PL comrades and friends in Chicago have made our presence known in many of the actions taken over the years against the notoriously racist and sexist CPD. We marched on Van Dyke’s home last summer to let everyone know that there’s no refuge for racist murderers.
We helped organize and lead a mass demonstration against the racist Fraternal Order of Police headquarters in Chicago this past September, pointing out how the kkkops’ “union” essentially helps them get away with murdering workers and youth.
With every action, we’ve made it our responsibility as communists to explain to the working class that freedom from racism and murderous cops doesn’t come through hiring more Black or Latin cops or through civilian “control” of the department—only through organizing for communist revolution and workers’ power all over the world.
The Fight for a Communist World Involves YOU!
The more intolerable that conditions get for the working class, in Chicago and all over the world, the more important our task as revolutionary communists becomes.
Readers of Challenge, anti-racist, anti-sexist fighters everywhere are strongly encouraged to connect with PLP during the week of July 9 through the 16 in Chicago as we fight back and continue building the movement to destroy the bosses and their profit system. Join the fight!
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Pride Parade: Surge of Class Anger, Must Reject Liberal Politics
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- 30 June 2017 28 hits
LOS ANGELES—Over 100,000 workers came out to show their support for the LGBTQ members of our class and all workers facing repression. In the past, LA Pride has hosted a parade and street fair in West Hollywood.
A local congregation with Progressive Labor Party members has marched in the parade with banners and signs proclaiming our church’s long history of performing gay marriages and supporting LGBTQ rights.
This year, in this period of heightened sexism and racism, especially towards immigrant and Muslim workers, the organizers announced that there would be a #Resist March for “human rights” instead.
We in PLP understand that there can be no rights for the working class under capitalism but applaud the efforts to broaden this struggle.
Rampant Racism
The roots of Pride originate in rebellion against racist, sexist, anti-gay police terror that we still see today. Black transgender women and gay men still face far more police harassment, terror and incarceration than any group within the LGBTQ section of our class and the working-class as a whole.
The rate of HIV/AIDS has recently reached staggering numbers. One in two Black gay men or transwomen will contract HIV in their lifetime. In other words, if the Black gay and trans youth and workers in the U.S. were a country, it would lead the world in HIV/AIDS rates.
Anti-Gay Violence & Police Terror Interrelated
In 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York at the Stonewall Inn bar, led by Black and Latin transgender, gay and lesbian patrons rebellions erupted against the police who raided and terrorized them. In fact, the first Pride march in Los Angeles in 1970 was also a response to police terror against the LGBTQ working class. Over the years though, Pride has become a weekend of celebration culminating in a parade.
Anger Limited to Anti-Trump
This year, the march itself was a step up in the level of political anger. Unfortunately, it was almost exclusively directed at Trump and the Republicans, instead of also calling out the complicity of the Democrats and the capitalist system as a whole—which requires police terror, racism, sexism and anti-gay politics to divide our class in order to maximize profits.
Through mass organizing in the church, on the job, and in the schools we were able to organize over a dozen base members to join a multiracial, multigenerational group of workers. When we passed a group of anti-gay counter-protesters, we led the group in a chant of “No Trump, No KKK, No fascist USA!”
But we have a long way to go in overcoming the identity politics, nationalism and pro-democrat ideology which are rampant in the march and in this congregation—all of which keep the working class more divided.
Mayor Garcetti, No Friend of Working Class
Mayor Eric Garcetti, the first Jewish mayor and second Mexican mayor of Los Angeles, who is a frequent speaker at Pride (and Women’s March) is not only given a platform to speak but is called “a champion of LGBTQ rights.” He gives lip service to the plight of transgender workers who face higher rates of unemployment and double the homelessness in the nation, claiming “this is a city built on diversity and inclusiveness…transgender Angelenos have limitless potential and deserve every chance to find employment” (LGBT Weekly, 12/2016). Under his leadership, the rates of homelessness (which increases the risk of HIV transmission) continue to rise under his tenure just as the number of unaffordable luxury condos sprout all over the city.
He’s justified the continuing privatization (charters) of public schools in LA that disproportionately affect Black, Latin and immigrant workers. He is silent while the school board terrorizes the students who walked out after the Trump inauguration and teachers face suspensions for supporting these students (including one PLP teacher). And while LA boasts the most diverse police force, the LAPD KKKops continue to the lead the way in the number of Black and Latin workers murdered by the police!
Next time, we have to do a better job at calling out these liberal misleaders for their role in the racist, sexist, anti-gay attacks on our class!
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‘People’s Summit’—Sanders Faction Exploits Workers’ Anger
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- 30 June 2017 29 hits
CHICAGO, June 11—Bernie Sanders’s second People’s Summit attempted to draw in and mislead 4,000 progressive-minded people. Much like UK’s Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, this faction of the Democratic Party aims to build liberal fascism with the backing of young people.
Rebuilding Democratic Party
While a good part of the working class hates the Trump administration, they also hate the Democrats. A national poll found 62 percent of people felt the Republicans were out of touch with the public, compared to 66 percent for Democrats (ABC, 4/23).
Taking place the day after the Labour Party in London won the second-largest number of seats in Parliament, the People’s Summit sought fresh blood for the murderous anti-worker organization: the Democratic Party. Sanders said, “The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure” (The Nation, 6/15). The Democratic Party faces a “widening breach” within their leadership and ranks, many bitter and trying to recover after its election failure. While some faction of the Democratic Party has reacted by moving to the right, the Sanders faction has continued to build faith in liberalism.
Using a lefty face, the Sanders faction, which includes Elizabeth Warren, is advocating for liberal fascism: mild reforms of wages, healthcare, and education while disciplining both the ruling and working class for a world of war. One of their main concerns is how best to sell a party of imperialism and war to a divided working class of an empire in decline. This faction seeks to assimilate those fed up with business as usual.
Bernie Con
This summit charged people up to $200 to attend and hear Sanders and other misleaders try to persuade workers that “we can vote out racism, sexism, imperialism and capitalism.” Progressive Labor Party was also at the summit to give a different message to workers: only communist revolution can destroy capitalism.
The People’s Summit was mainly a “Comic Con” for Sanders supporters. There were classes with topics such as “Building a Movement that will Win,” “The Rigged Economy” (but hardly talk about capitalism), or “Voices of Resistance & Power.” The Sanders faction has co-opted language of mass fightback but hardly any Black or Latin workers were to be seen, neither on the panels nor in the audience.
They also had a session on “Down-Ballot Revolutionaries” led by Khalid Kamau, a Black Lives Matter activist turned politician, which focused on getting those under 35 into office at all levels of government. This session shows how important it is for the bosses to funnel working-class anger into state-sanctioned politics. It also exposes how desperate the Democratic Party is for younger leadership.
They talked about “building a movement” but the summit failed to invite or even talk about the fightback or the local organizations from Chicago, the very city in which this conference is being held.
Sanders and his group allowed various revisionist groups to have information tables at this summit.
Classic Misleadership
During this summit, the talk going around was about “resistance” but Sanders and his cronies don’t say take to the streets and fight racism and sexism. They preach voting for change. Hardly any of the misleaders at this conference encouraged the attendees to join the local protest against the Neo-Nazi group Act for America and kkkops at a rally that took place on the Saturday of the conference (see CHALLENGE, 6/28). Most of the people there didn’t even know it was going on.
A PL’er talked to some workers at the summit about going to the rally and joining with the party and other anti-racists. One conference attendee said, “I paid a lot of money to be here and I want to get my money’s worth.”
Honest Workers Ready to Fight
But out of the dead-end of Sanders’ ideas, there were workers, young and old that truly wanted to fight back against capitalism and imperialism. One of the only highlights of this summit was the meeting of Black workers at the end of the conference. Again like all capitalist movements, Black workers were marginalized and issues were ‘pushed to the back’ if they were talked about at all.
During the meeting, a Party member gave a speech about how only communism can truly destroy racism and sexism and that Black workers are the key to revolution. Most of the workers in the meeting were interested in the party and took CHALLENGE. Many didn’t know about communism or had disagreements, but they too were interested in Progressive Labor Party’s fight to abolish racism and sexism.