CHICAGO, July 13—A feature of the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) recent Chicago Summer Project was a “Labor History Bus Tour” around the city. The tour showcased locations of historical working-class battles dating to the nineteenth century, and locations of current struggles involving PLP.
Union Stockyards: Hotbed of Class Struggle
We started at the former location of the giant Union Stockyards, once a world famous animal slaughterhouse known as the “hog butcher of the world.” Formerly sprawling over a square mile, thousands of Black, white, and women workers waged intense class struggle against the capitalist meatpackers who treated the workers horribly while stealing millions of dollars in profits. The Union Stockyards were named after the Union side of the U.S. Civil War. Basing the stockyards entirely on war production needs, the northern industrial capitalists settled on the site to pack meat for soldiers in the war. We reviewed stories from The Jungle written by radical journalist Upton Sinclair in 1906, and the memoirs of a leader in the old communist movement, William Z. Foster, who organized labor unions in the slaughter houses in 1917 during World War I.
Despite filthy and deadly working conditions inside the plants, most workers were not organized into labor unions. Those who were had craft unions based on their job titles. They were also divided by race—in 1917, of 60,000 packinghouse workers, 12,000 were Black. However, only the Butcher Workmen’s Union allowed Black workers to join. We found their old union hall and we stopped by the old main gate to the stockyards, which held pictures and information of what life was like in those meat factories.
We also learned how the bosses are always relentless in their efforts to maximize profits off their workforce. In the winter of 1917-1918, Foster described how the meatpacking bosses were afraid of a strike inside the plants during a mass union campaign that was uniting the various craft unions to fight the oppressive conditions. A major union at the time, and still today, was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which represented skilled, white workers. In this struggle the AFL misleaders prevented the workers from striking and agreed to a government mediation process for the workers’ grievances. Many workers came forward to expose the treatment they suffered under. Armour, one of the biggest meat bosses, testified that he had made 40 million dollars in profits in 1917 alone. So to avoid a shortage of food stuffs during war, the packing house bosses raised wages, gave workers 10 hours pay for 8 hours work, and a lunch break.
It was apparently a victory. But as soon as the imperialist war was over, the stockyards were flooded with spies, goons, and “organizers” who moved to return to the craft union style in the plants. Foster, who was an organizer and leader in the old Communist Party, made no mention of study groups or leadership training programs. Progressive Labor Party has learned that we have to be involved in reform struggles with the working class while also educating workers on the evils of the capitalist system.
Haymarket: The Birth of May Day
We also made stops connected to the famous Haymarket events in 1886 that led to the creation of the international communist holiday, May Day. These events did not fall from the sky. In the 1870s, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world. Fortunes were being made off the backs of immigrant workers. Families lived in deplorable conditions. At the time, one of the biggest capitalists in Chicago was Marshall Field, founder of a department store chain today known as Macy’s. After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, workers all around the world sent money to the Relief Fund. Workers later discovered that Field and his cronies controlled the Relief Fund money, and were using it for themselves.
Working class outrage, alongside the struggle for an eight-hour workday, grew. In April of 1886, angry workers marched around the new Board of Trade’s opening banquet with a beautiful red flag, led by Lucy and Albert Parsons, a Black and white couple. By then, the struggle for the eight-hour day had struck a chord with masses of workers and thousands were demanding it. Revolutionary socialists like the Parsons and August Spies joined these struggles and tirelessly organized and educated workers around revolutionary ideas inside the workers’ unions and community organizations.
On Saturday May 1, 1886, thousands marched down Michigan Avenue singing labor and revolutionary songs. Factories all over Chicago closed down. The city was tense. Then, at a gathering on May 3, the police fired at a group of workers supporting the McCormick Reapers strikers, killing two with no remorse. The city bosses were looking to retaliate!
Overnight the workers called for a demonstration in Haymarket Square, at that time a busy intersection and commercial area, to protest these murders the very next night, May 4. The rally was small and breaking up, when the police charged up the street and opened fire. Someone, possibly a police agent looking to provoke chaos, threw a bomb, and seven cops died in the chaos. The Chicago bosses used this incident to suspend the legal rights of anyone suspected of radical politics and to harass working-class leaders. They used their newspapers to build disapproval of the workers.
Seven of the workers’ leaders, including Albert Parsons and August Spies, were charged with murder and convicted. Before being executed, they were allowed to address the court, which they did for three days. Their speeches have gone down in history, especially Spies’ final warning to the bosses: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” All seven denounced the bosses’ court and capitalist wage slavery. All were defiant to the end.
At the birthplace of May Day, we sang the Internationale, the anthem the international working class, with fists in the air and the admiration for working-class fightback in our hearts.
Humboldt Park: Fightback Against Police Terror
Next we stopped by Humboldt Park where, in June 1977, Progressive Labor Party held a march the morning after a Puerto Rican community had rebelled in response to the police murders of two Puerto Rican youth. A comrade told us of how PL’ers marched to the police station where the killer cops worked, holding signs and red flags, and distributing CHALLENGEs. The cops were unsettled by the group’s boldness and by the great respect of the youth who came up to them and cheered them on!
La Casita Vive!
Lastly was a stop at “La Casita,” the site of a struggle by parents of elementary schoolers fighting to have a library built at their school. For years, the local bosses denied this school a library, which mainly serves the children of workers from Mexico. Many parents pushed to renovate an old park building alongside the school into library. For years, nothing. Then, when these same bosses announced the old park building would be demolished in order to build a soccer field for a nearby mostly-white, upper-income private school, the parents rebelled! For 43 days straight, parents, fellow workers, and PL’ers occupied the old park building, which they called “La Casita” (the little house), to physically prevent the demolition. The students’ parents, mainly from Mexico, while worried about deportations, were determined to fight for their children to have a library and had had enough of the way the politicians and school bosses treated them. La Casita was eventually torn down, but the morale of some parents was strengthened through their contact with the Party.
This concluded the tour. The Summer Project participants were a wonderful group of young and old, committed, multiracial and multigender PLP members and friends. The struggle continues, and we must continue fighting for as long as we live!
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Haiti: Fight for Minimum Wage Continues Workers Expose Bosses’ State
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- 28 July 2017 62 hits
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 12—Workers have kept their word: The fight against the capitalist bosses for an increase in the minimum wage continues into its third day. Class struggle is intensifying, with several thousand workers and students demonstrating in the streets of the capital. After marching for miles, they arrived at the Parliament and called on legislators to reject the report of the High Council on Salaries, which recommends a measly 35-gourde increase in the daily minimum wage of 300 gourdes (US$4.60).
Reinforced by two loudspeakers, the militant protestors marched through downtown streets and residential neighborhoods, singing and chanting slogans against the bosses. In particular, they targeted Jovenel Moise as a “puppet of the bourgeoisie,” the famously corrupt capitalist ruling class that bleeds workers for profit. Moise is a protégé of former President Michel Martelly, the brutal thug who ran a plundering police state and collaborated with MINUSTAH, the hated United Nations occupation army that caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti. In 2015, Martelly’s ruling-party machine propelled Moise into a runoff despite exit polls showing he’d received only six percent of the vote in a low-turnout, massively fraudulent election (Haiti Sentinel, 11/19/15). So much for capitalist “democracy!”
Minimal Wages, Maximum Profits
The rulers’ justification for the unlivable minimum wage is that it will create more jobs. While the bosses’ media admit to an unemployment rate of 40 percent (indexmundi), 80 percent of the working class lives in wretched poverty. Another seven percent are employed in the private sector, which rarely pays the legal minimum. If 300 gourdes per day doesn’t create jobs, 335 won’t, either!
The protesters, mainly young women between 21 and 35, were demanding a minimum daily salary of 800 gourdes (US$12), which might meet at least some basic needs, including health care. One young woman said, “At 23, I should be at university instead of wasting my strength for the bosses and a few pennies.”
Another worker said, “If we continue to work for this tubercular wage, we will never be able to feed our children, house ourselves, or have decent health care.”
The protesters didn’t mince words, openly calling out the state for protecting the capitalists’ interests. In one chant, they said, “We don’t have a government, it’s in the service of the bosses; we don’t have a president, he’s in the service of Apaid, Becker, Alain (local big business owners)…”
‘Burn and Crush the Bosses’
All along the march, the workers raised the miserable situations they are forced to endure by the profit system: “Some supervisors whip us workers…Many of us work 12 hours a day…If we want to earn 500 gourdes (US$8) a day, we have to produce 300 dozen T-shirts.”
One, marching with four companions, said passionately, “I have been working for one boss in outsourcing since 2003, before there was a union. When I protested about working conditions, I was booted out. But I continue to fight. Now we have more organizations, we can do as in other workers’ revolutions, burn and crush the bosses.” He clearly has a desire to end the bosses’ murderous reign.
Another worker who accompanied him added, “I believe that if workers organize and are not afraid, they can do anything.” Showing a keen understanding of capitalist exploitation and surplus value, the chorus of five concluded, “Without us the bosses are nothing, it is our work that makes them wealthy!”
These workers suffer under inhuman conditions. How can a parent or a young person live on a salary that is scarcely enough to pay the cost of transportation to get to work in the first place? That is why they chanted unequivocally: “We’ve had enough, time to revolt!”
One comrade called on students to unite with striking clerical workers at the State University of Haiti (UEH) and street vendors demanding permanent marketplaces, and to build a single force against the bosses and the state. Workers see that the struggle must be organized apart from mass union organizations that are tools of the bosses who try to entice workers with crumbs. Enough of crumbs! The working class creates all wealth! We have the right to share it among ourselves!
From the Masses, to the Masses
Some phony leaders carry the red flag and say they are for revolution. But they have shown time and again that they are merely opportunists, spouting meaningless slogans as they try to mislead workers into reformist politics. More and more workers are seeing through these political hacks. Engaged in struggle and discussion with comrades in Progressive Labor Party (PLP), they are developing confidence in our comrades and in our ideas. They are beginning to see the difference between PLP and other groups. As our ties in the working class deepen and we struggle ideologically and in class battle side by side, we are developing more and more confidence in the working class as well.
Workers’ struggles in Haiti, according to one young worker, are sharpening: “They have become more mature than before. But we have to be on guard against the opportunist politicians and mass leaders.” It is in this context, despite our modest numbers, that our PLP comrades are giving leadership in mass mobilizations and in leading class-conscious chants and songs.
University students are also developing more confidence in our Party. They believe our line is correct and are reassured when our comrades are present in many different battles. Their banners signal the unity of students with workers’ struggles, especially since many of the workers are their fathers and mothers.
Communism is the future of our world. As one worker said at today’s demonstration, the world cannot be transformed without the struggle of workers against the bosses and their agents. PLP is fighting to organize the international working class as a single fist, to put an end to the misery of capitalism once and for all and build an anti-racist, anti-sexist, egalitarian communist world.
As PLP maintains, “Together we are unbeatable! Join us!”
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Chicago Project Trains Communists, Builds Working-Class Confidence
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- 28 July 2017 63 hits
CHICAGO, July 17—More than 100 members and friends, ages 11-72, women and men, Asian, Latin, Black, and white participated in the weeklong Summer Project. The goal of the Summer Project was to support the political struggles in Chicago, educate ourselves and our base, and reach out to workers across the region with a revolutionary communist analysis.
Communist Agitation
On the first day, during a cookout in the park, comrades and friends worked together to develop a
political editorial for CHALLENGE. We struggled together to understand the complex ideas of inter-imperialist rivalry and then write about them in a way to help working-class readers understand and see the need to fight back.
The next day we went to three bus barns to talk to bus operators. In Chicago, the bus and train operators are in different locals of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Local 308, the train operators, had held a strike authorization vote with 97 percent voting in favor of a strike. They have been working without a contract for 18 months and management wants to make cuts to their healthcare and pensions. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) encouraged members of Local 241, the bus operators, to support their brothers and sisters in local 308, and to take a strike authorization vote of their own (see letters, page 6). The bus operators were impressed to see so many young people up at 4:30 in the morning distribute them leaflets and newspapers on their way into work, and had a wonderful response to our militant, revolutionary message.
After our morning with the bus operators, we gathered to study political economy. (It is based on the understanding that the economy is a political relationship between classes—under capitalism that relationship is one of exploitation of the working class by the capitalists for profit. Political economy also helps us understand how capitalism is a historical process that must be replaced by communism.)
Capitalist education and media will have you believe that these are complex ideas that only experts can really understand. But PL’ers know the working class can and must know how capitalism exploits the working class—so we can fight it. Veteran and new, Black, Latin, Asian, and white, we all worked together to break down these ideas and connect them to our lives.
When we later sold CHALLENGEs at CTA bus stops in the afternoon, Black workers on the South Side of Chicago were happy to see an organization calling for the destruction of racism. By the end of the day, we had distributed 1,000 papers to workers in Chicago! We received the same response throughout the Summer Project, as we held many CHALLENGE sales. One day as we were rallying at a hospital, a sheriff van with imprisoned workers drove by, and as the workers heard what we were saying on the bullhorn, some lifted their fists in solidarity. A comrade reflected that “they were like all of the working class—imprisoned by capitalism but still keeping a fight back spirit alive.”
Our last day was spent in a predominantly Latin neighborhood situated right next to Cook County jail. The jail is the largest single-site jail in the U.S., with a current population of about 7,500, and an average of 70,000 people passing through its cells each year. We marched to the jail, making the link between racist mass deportations and mass incarceration, with speeches and chants in both Spanish and English. The response to the paper and our march was overwhelming.
Communist Education
Education is a weapon, and we made sure we were well-armed during the Summer Project. Each day there were study groups covering topics ranging from the political economy of healthcare, to the divisiveness of identity politics, to the history and role of policing in the U.S. Through these interactive sessions we gained deeper understanding of how the world works and how we have to change it. One college comrade realized during the discussion about political economy that “they really just exploit us on the job everyday.” Other comrades shared ideas and resources so we all emerged stronger to defeat the capitalist system.
We didn’t just read to educate ourselves—we also wrote! We spent the first part of the Summer Project writing, drawing, editing, and translating the next issue of CHALLENGE. Producing the paper in this collective way was enlightening—both for those of us who work on it regularly and those of us who didn’t know everything that goes into producing the paper every two weeks. The new issue was printed in time to use on the last day of the project and it was great to see everyone rushing to read what we had put together so collectively. We should make efforts to always produce CHALLENGE more collectively.
Another day, one of the most fun ways we learned during the Summer Project was when we rented a school bus and went on an inspiring labor history tour of Chicago, to see the places of communists’ and PL’s long history of fightback.
Communist Culture
Throughout the summer project, we all lived, worked, ate, and learned together. We saw what communist culture looks like—sharing, building each other up to achieve new heights, struggling with each other in honest commitment to build the best Party we can, and committing to hard work for the needs of the working class. Over the week many young and new comrades who were hesitant to give a speech at the beginning, by the end of the week, got on the bullhorn. They shared personal stories that have informed their political views and led chants like “the only solution is communist revolution!”
We had newcomers share viewpoints that expanded our analysis and become leaders. Seeing the growth in everyone as communists was beautiful. By the end of the Summer Project, two people joined the Party! We are excited to grow PLP and build anti-racist class consciousness among the international working class. We can’t wait to get back to our jobs, schools, and communities, where we will build on what we learned this summer, and get our class one step closer to destroying this capitalist system.
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Colombia Teachers Strike, Bosses Counter with State Terror
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- 28 July 2017 67 hits
BOGOTA, Colombia, July 20—Three hundred and fifty thousand public school teachers went on a 37-day strike demanding better healthcare, more funding for school maintenance, supplies, student meals, higher salaries and the end to racist policies against working-class teachers and students. The bosses, falsely promised that the money that went to fighting the fake left Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) would now be used for education, and now owe the teachers several billions of pesos. Teachers’ quality of life is suffering as they work in subhuman conditions for millions of students.
The bosses’ response to the striking teachers has been to deny funding. But they spend money on war, repression, corruption, high salaries for politicians and generous interests for the World Bank. One such boss, Juan Manuel Santos, the warmongering mayor of Peñalosa, uses his fascist squadrons to repress the educators. Three teachers have been killed and several injured in the demonstrations.
Knowing that the bosses lie and betray workers, the teachers intensified the struggle and have been courageously fighting back in near-daily marches, blocking busy roads in the capital.
Progressive Labor Party has been present at all the marches and meetings. Two teachers, readers of CHALLENGE, have been leading the struggle, and keeping it militant and being vigilant about the decisions that are made.
Many unions and political organizations have displayed solidarity with the teachers. This is a step forward in the political struggle. Our work is to create a mass base for communism and to train new leaders so the bosses will not be able to control us. PLP knows that this reform struggle will not itself bring down capitalism. Our friends also understand this and many teachers are fighting for advances in the revolutionary process by talking about and distributing our literature.
Today’s struggles, from farm workers, to healthcare workers, to bus drivers, to conductors, construction workers, the unemployed, and street vendors, should be turned into united workers’ struggle. We have to win workers to working-class consciousness and advance the struggle for revolution. Capitalism will not stop attacking us. We are fighting to destroy capitalism, we have no other option. We will build the international PLP and create a system that serves the interests of the working class: communism.
CHICAGO, July 11—Over 50 comrades and friends participating in Progressive Labor Party’s Summer Project took action to blast the racist and sexist “healthcare” system under capitalism. They brought a revolutionary communist vision of health and collective power to the working class of Chicago, during a packed day of CHALLENGE sales, forums, and a bold rally.
Early to Rise, Early to Struggle
Comrades arrived at two different hospitals on the city’s primarily Black and Latin west side at 6:00 am to greet workers and patients with CHALLENGE and fliers as they entered the facilities. In less than an hour, over 400 fliers and CHALLENGEs were sold and several workers gave us their information so PLP could be in touch with them.
The two hospitals, Mount Sinai and Stroger Hospital of Cook County, are the only options available for many Black and undocumented workers and their families. Because of the overwhelming racism of the system, workers and patients alike face poor staffing, long wait times, and cutbacks on essential services. The racist bosses of both facilities have committed a brutal attack on the working class with the decision to completely eliminate pediatric inpatient services. Communists say: a system that won’t guarantee comprehensive healthcare to the working class doesn’t deserve to exist!
Only Communism Will Heal Our Class
The collective next held a study group on the political economy of healthcare at a local university. A physician comrade talked about capitalism’s drive to provide medical services only as a means to ensure the productivity (and thereby profitability) of workers. Healthcare didn’t develop out of the “goodwill” of the bosses. To have workers drop dead in the fields or the factories was simply bad for their bottom line, so they established the minimum services necessary to ensure a steady exploitation of our labor.
We discussed historical examples of communist-influenced healthcare, such as when
communists in China doubled life expectancy in the span of a single generation through massive public health campaigns and breaking down elitist hierarchies in the hospitals and clinics. This
example, and others, reminded everyone how workers can and have made tremendous strides in healthcare when armed with communist politics and organization.
Smash Racist Healthcare
Eager to put theory into practice, comrades and friends returned to Stroger Hospital that same afternoon for a PLP rally. Sharp chants and bold speeches were given from a bullhorn as we held a picket line at the entrances. Even more CHALLENGES and fliers were handed out to workers. Comrades, many of whom were giving their first-ever speeches on a bullhorn, blasted capitalist healthcare and its racist and sexist cutbacks, calling on workers to fight for revolutionary alternatives.
In a matter of minutes, the rally caught the bosses’ attention. Racist kkkops attempted to shut down the picket, saying we were breaking the law by marching on the sidewalk in front of the hospital. PL’ers defied their bogus threats by chanting even louder and holding our ground! Eventually, we forced the cops to back off and our speeches and chants became even bolder and revolutionary. Hundreds of CHALLENGEs were
distributed, and many workers driving past honked in solidarity.
Addiction is a Disease of Capitalism
The day concluded with a forum on the current opioid epidemic in the U.S. Clear connections were made between alienation, pharmaceutical profits, incarceration, and capitalism. A collective analysis determined that capitalism was responsible for the opioid crisis, and that it had no therapeutic solutions to treat the increasing number of workers struggling with addiction. We also discussed the racism of the bosses’ attacks on Black workers struggling with crack addiction in the 1980s, and their more compassionate reporting of the overwhelmingly white workers that are
suffering from this opioid crisis.
Once again, capitalist “solutions” to drug addiction and selling were contrasted with communist approaches. Comprehensive medical treatment, collective struggle, and full access to productive labor and healthy recreation were among some of the more worker-based methods to treating addiction shared within the groups. Many participants shared personal experiences as well as historical examples, stimulating discussion and envisioning a world where destructive drug epidemics are a thing of the past.
Communism is the Antidote to Capitalist Poison
The truth is that capitalism can offer no healthy future for our class. The system bankrupts us, charging enormous fees to treat diseases that it causes, if workers even have access to those treatments. Their pursuit of profit will always come before workers’ needs! No reform will ever change that basic fact. The prescription that PLP gives is to join and build a mass anti-racist, anti-sexist international Party for communist revolution. As a united working class, we can take our health needs into our own hands and send capitalism straight to the morgue!
