While the capitalists created borders (see page 2), Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always organized solidarity across them, in defiance of them, and will one day abolish them once and for all. Here, we look at the Party’s championing of internationalism. Our 54-year-long fight against these deadly borders contains the seeds of a communist alternative worthy of our working-class sisters and brothers.
Communist internationalism
PLP has advanced the tradition of communist internationalism that began with the First International and the Paris Commune of 1871. We have carried the torch of internationalism to its logical and necessary conclusion: one world, one class, one Party fighting directly for communism. No retreats along nationalist lines!
PLP is an international communist party because the working class is one class everywhere, with a universal class interest. Since workers produce everything of value, we can collectively determine how to share it according to need. We don’t need bosses, a class that steals most of that value through wage slavery. We stand for the abolition of capitalism; we fight to eliminate racism, sexism, and nationalism.
Our internationalism means working-class unity that follows the slogan, “Smash All Borders!”
It means a united working class led by one mass, international Party containing hundreds of millions of communist workers. We reject the call by various national “communist” parties for nationalist “roads to socialism.” This formulation is drawn from capitalist-created countries that divide the international working class and negate its universal class character.
Unlike the old communist movement, PLP does not separate along nationalist lines. Though our circumstances and tactics may differ in the U.S. and East Africa, our political line for communist revolution is the same everywhere. We oppose nationalism, which leads to workers uniting behind “their” capitalist bosses and fighting “foreign” or immigrant workers. The concept of two opposing, worldwide classes — workers against bosses — is fundamental to destroying capitalism and establishing communism.
PLP grows worldwide
The following are just some of the struggles that reflect the Party’s internationalist practice:
In 1964, in solidarity with the workers and youth of Vietnam, PLP formed the May 2nd Movement to oppose the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam. We organized the first mass demonstration against the war under the slogan, “U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Vietnam!” This slogan eventually was adopted by millions, challenging the calls by liberals and phony leftists to “Stop the Bombing” and “Negotiate,” neither of which indicted U.S. imperialism (see CHALLENGE, 8/12/15).
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, PL’ers joined the military to win soldiers to refuse to kill their sisters and brothers in Vietnam and instead to turn the guns against the U.S. ruling class.
During the 1984-85 British miners’ strike, PLP organized support campaigns, bringing miners to the U.S. to speak at rallies and on campuses. They exposed the brutal policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who ordered police attacks on strikers and laid off tens of thousands.
In El Salvador, PLP recruited from among former fighters for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, after the FMLN became an electoral party that betrayed the revolution.
In Palestine-Israel, PLP joined mass demonstrations against Israeli rulers’ demolition of Palestinian villages. We fought sub-standard wages enforced by slave traders and exposed the rulers’ racism perpetrated against immigrants from Africa.
In Mexico, PLP members in the teachers’ union fought government attacks to break their strikes and cripple the schools through privatization.
In East Africa, PLP is organizing among students and teachers and waging anti-sexist struggles.
In Colombia, PLP mobilized striking workers, from refrigerator factories to beer factories. PLP’s revolutionary line was so threatening to revisionists [fake leftists] and bosses alike that death threats to our comrades were common.
In Haiti, we grew from a club of trade unionists and students to one embedding itself into the agricultural working class. PLP fought against MINUSTAH, the UN occupation force that triggered the spread of cholera, as well as racist deportations and inadequate sewage and plumbing systems.
In Pakistan, PL’ers organized aid for workers devastated by an earthquake, while the government abandoned the victims. We are fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses’ attacks, especially on super-exploited women working in subhuman conditions and earning little or no pay.
With the advent of U.S. imperialist assaults on the working class in Afghanistan and Iraq, PL launched campaigns attacking the murders of millions by U.S. rulers, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Pickets were organized at embassies in U.S. cities. PL’ers enlisted in the military to spread the Party’s ideas among soldiers in Iraq and to oppose attacks on working-class families there.
Spreading solidarity and ideology
PLP has organized international solidarity for local struggles. Comrades in Haiti wrote letters of solidarity to City University of New York students during the campaign to oust war criminal David Petraeus from campus. In Brooklyn, PLP rallied in immigrant neighborhoods in response to racist deportations in the Dominican Republic. Word of PLP’s actions and communist ideology have spread across the world, both through immigrant workers from Latin America and through CHALLENGE on the internet.
Today, CHALLENGE is printed in English, Spanish, French, Creole, Arabic, Hebrew, Dari, Urdu, and more.
One class, one fight for communism
The world we fight for is one where workers’ power will reign supreme. A communist world will wipe out borders created by the bosses to reap more profits from exploiting those they call “foreigners.” It will eradicate imperialist wars, which the rulers launch to grab resources and cheap labor. In a communist world, there will be no foreigners, no “illegal” migrants, no refugees from war or poverty.
While the reformists continue to fragment themselves with the identity politics of race, gender, sexuality, or national loyalties, PLP unites ALL workers, based on class-consciousness. Over the last 54 years, our staunch internationalism made has helped us grow from an organization with a handful of workers in New York to a Party that spans 27 countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe. That is no small victory! Forward to another 50 years of communist organizing that puts the international working class above the individual.
Workers in Senegal have the same interest as workers in China or Chile or the U.S.: a society that will meet their class’s needs. An egalitarian, communist world. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for yourselves, for your children and for future generations.
We have a Party to organize and a world to win!
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Shantel’s 7-year anniversary: Black leadership key to revolution
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- 30 June 2019 689 hits
Brooklyn, June 14 - “How do you spell RACIST? N-Y-P-D!!!” This uncompromising chant was shouted in defiance by a determined band of anti-racist fighters who rallied and blocked traffic in memory of Shantel Davis, murdered by killer kkkop ‘Bad Boy’ Phillip Atkins seven years ago today.
A blue-shirted ‘community affairs’ cop attempted to rush a solemn release of balloons in memory of Shantel and anger exploded among families, who had members killed by cops. The cops interference only served to prolong our occupation of the street. Carloads of plainclothes assassins like the one who shot Shantel swarmed the scene. No arrests were made, as the show of fascist strength was matched by the strength of multi-racial working class unity with communist politics in the lead.
Though Public Advocate Jumaane Williams (the #2 figure in New York City government under Mayor Bill de Blasio) was present, Shantel’s sister asked a Progressive Labor Party member to give the opening speech. Jumaane has been in our protests from the start, but has delivered little. Here is the PLP speech:
Like so many other families who have survived racist cop murder, the one thing Shantel’s sister wants is for no other family to have to suffer the loss she has faced. But this is the one thing that no elected official can promise. In fact, just nine months after Shantel was killed by Atkins, Kimani Gray, 16, was killed by cops working out of the same Flatbush precinct, the 67.
Atkins had a record of settlements against him well into six figures at the time he murdered Shantel. The city paid out damages because he had a track record of being brutal. But he was kept on the streets. In fact, the city knows who are their most brutal cops, because they pay out the money in damages when complaints are filed. Yet the ruling class keeps these cops on the force no matter who the mayor is. Elections do not change that. And so any leader who tells you that an election can give Shantel’s sister, and all the other grieving families, a system where racist cop murder won’t happen again is a liar and a misleader. In fact the youth rebellion that erupted after Kimani was killed, or the rebellion that just hit Memphis,over another police killing of a Black man, are closer to what it is going to take to end racist cop murder than any election could ever be.
This misleaders’ strategy of elections will only get more intense as we approach the 2020 election. But just like liberals want us to live with racist cop murder, they will hide their march to World War III behind the cover of being anti-Trump.
These families have suffered a loss the rest of us can’t imagine. We need to trust their leadership to continue the struggle through the emotional ups and downs of life without their loved ones, not the misleadership of those who point us to elections as an answer. It’s going to take a revolution and a communist world for us to have the society that will deliver on the promise of making racist cop murder a thing of the past.
Another speaker called for multiracial unity and a rejection of the kind of identity politics that would make Shantel’s murder a ‘Black issue’ or a ‘women’s issue.’ Her call for working class solidarity was loud and clear.
When mis-leader Jumaane spoke there was little left for him to say. He said that it is true he could never deliver on a promise that any racist cop murder would be the last. That it was true that the most important leaders are un-elected, even that capitalism was no good and that he hoped to be ‘with us’ in a revolution, but that for now we had to use the tools of the system, like we use money every day, and vote.
This is why liberal politicians are the most dangerous: because they will say whatever it takes – including that they want a revolution – to get us to live with capitalism’s inevitable and necessary attacks on our class. This is how we must understand Sanders’ call for a ‘political revolution’ and who ever else emerges as the anti-Trump in 2020 – they want us to live with what is killing us, capitalism. We will have to kill their influence over the workers in order to kill capitalism.
For a short time on the seventh anniversary of Shantel’s death, on one street corner in Flatbush, in the face of a disproportionate police presence, the multi-racial, intergenerational working class, with bold leadership from Black workers and communists, achieved the kind of political victory that will bring us closer to the classless society that will not only forever abolish racist cop murder, but also the very concept of race.
CHICAGO, June 24 – Working-class Latin immigrant mothers and their supporters continued their struggle against the racist Chicago Public Schools (CPS) today. In the face of tricks and obstacles, the mothers persisted on having a meeting with newly-appointed board president Miguel del Valle regarding the application of magnet status for their children’s dual-language elementary school.
This struggle to re-designate the school as a magnet school is the latest in a long string of battles that these working-class parents have waged against the racist CPS for the district’s attacks on their school and majority-Latin community. Comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been involved in many of these fights and continue to advocate for communist revolution as the only way to guarantee the best education for workers and their children worldwide.
Don’t back down
The meeting with del Valle today was set weeks ahead of time, confirmed through a series of emails exchanged with a PLP comrade and del Valle’s secretary. When we arrived at the president’s luxurious downtown office, however, the receptionist as well as a pair of CPS lackeys began to give us the runaround.
The lackeys first informed us that del Valle was not available, and that the plan was that on this day we would meet with other CPS representatives instead. After we showed these flunkies the email confirmations that we received that we had in fact scheduled the appointment with him specifically, the story changed into how his secretary had since sent cancellation emails to the comrade (which were unsurprisingly never found). It became obvious that CPS was really trying to get out of any obligation to meet with the mothers.
But we were not about to be moved. The mothers as well as the school principal were persistent and pushed back, continuing to show the emails until the CPS flunkies ushered us into a boardroom where del Valle and a handful of other executives magically appeared.
Capitalism fails the working class
Now that we had the CPS bosses’ attention, we were able to pressure them for answers about the status of the application to convert Whittier Elementary into the only dual-language magnet school on the city’s south side.
The school is situated in what is still a majority Latin immigrant working-class neighborhood but which is rapidly gentrifying. Whittier is operating at a little more than half of its enrollment capacity, as more working-class families are displaced by rising rent prices.
By converting the school into a magnet school, by the parents and staff hope to draw in more working-class students who can benefit from the dual Spanish-English program, increase enrollment, and fight off the threat of the school closing in the not-too-distant future.
The application was submitted back in October of 2018, and the parents have faced a lot of racist and sexist indifference from CPS. The application was quickly denied by the district, without explanation. What’s more, the parents who have attended CPS board meetings to bring attention to the school have been made to wait for hours on end to speak. Practically all the mothers involved only speak Spanish, but were offered no translation services from CPS for one of these meetings in April in order to understand what was being discussed.
Today, the immigrant working-class mothers gave testimony on the strengths of the community-centered school and the benefits it has had for the students. One Latin mother, who was forced to move to another neighborhood to the southwest, spoke about how she still drives two of her children to attend Whittier each morning because of the positive impact it has had on their education and language skills.
The CPS bosses faked sincerity and promised to get back to us with updates and a decision in the upcoming weeks. Del Valle and Lori Lightfoot, the new mayor who appointed him, are painting themselves as progressives who are ready to defend education for working-class students. In fact, we need to see these liberals as the main danger to the working class.
Look back no further than past liberal mayor Rahm Emanuel, who championed progressive causes during his campaign and then closed fifty schools, the majority of which were in Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods. A number of his CPS appointees were charged with incompetence and corruption, including former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett.
As long as capitalism treats education as a commodity and working-class students as criminals and future soldiers to be mobilized for war, we can expect more of the same. A communist education is the only one really worth fighting for, where education is not based on money or profits but is a collective, lifelong process grounded in the needs of our class.
Remember La Casita
As we were leaving the CPS office, a comrade told the bosses, “I’m not sure what your decision will be, but I’ve known these parents for many years, and I know that they’re fighters. If you cross them, you’ll have another La Casita on your hands.”
The comrade was referring to the struggle over a community center at Whittier Elementary, which immigrant workers occupied for over a month in 2010 when CPS threatened to demolish it. The bosses eventually succeeded, but many immigrant workers and PLP comrades fought and learned much in the process.
It’s those lessons and fighting spirit that we’ll maintain during the struggles ahead, part of the broader struggle to overcome all the capitalist bosses’ attacks by winning more workers to a communist future.
SANTA MONICA, CA, June 18– Nearly 100 hotel workers, community members, and clergy marched through the hotel district in Santa Monica, rallying in front of two hotels and City Hall. The focus of the struggle is to combat sexism in the workplace and improve conditions for the overworked, mostly female housekeeping staff. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members work in a church that is part of a coalition called Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, which is currently supporting the efforts of local hotel workers to unionize and improve working conditions.
Their most recent struggle has been focused on combating sexist conditions in the workplace, especially the sexual harassment and assault perpertrated by management and hotel guests. The workers and the union are pushing the City Council to pass an ordinance that would mandate that panic buttons be placed in all guest rooms; provide for humane workloads and job retention rights when hotel ownership changes; and begin necessary training for supervisors and staff on preventing human trafficking, domestic and sexual violence, and labor abuse.
At the rallies, there were the usual talks from Council members, but the most inspiring speeches were from the workers themselves. The women talked about their experiences with sexism on the job and how they have stayed strong and kept fighting because of the support they’ve received from fellow workers and the community.Their campaign started last fall with informational forums, where workers shared their stories. As nearby jurisdictions started passing panic button ordinances, the workers and the union began to craft their own housekeeper’s bill of rights. Then they circulated a petition to gather community support. At our church, we’ve been gathering signatures after services and making announcements from the pulpit.
Santa Monica hotels are not alone in the sexist and racist mistreatment of their workers. In Los Angeles, workers are organizing a union at the trendy Freehand Hotel, owned by multi-millionaire real estate developer Andrew Zobler. Workers have faced “speed-up” — the number of beds and bathrooms they must clean has doubled. As a result, they have no time for breaks or even quick water breaks.When they began to organize a union, management threatened to report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and made antigay remarks comments to some union delegates.
Since the owners of hotels and every other business want to maximize profits, they seek to cut labor costs whenever possible. How this affects the workers—damaging their health, and their family lives—is of no concern to the owners. We support the collective action of workers to improve their conditions and defeat racist and sexist treatment. We also bring to the struggle the understanding that capitalism will always use racism and sexism to oppress the working class and extract maximum profits, but that workers have the power to overthrow that system with a communist revolution that allows the international working class to run society for the benefit of all.
SPAIN, June 24—A small fascist party called Vox is taking hold here. The Vox party panders to the domestic-oriented bosses, along with the disaffected racist and sexist working-class people who make Vox’s base. These little fascists are secondary to the main danger—liberal fascism.
The current division we see worldwide is between the main finance capital wing of the ruling class who are committed to imperialist interests and more domestically focused capitalists who don’t want to pay the bill in higher taxes that it will take for a global war to maintain that control. Immigration is one of the fault lines of these divisions.
Gutter fascists grow out of crisis and splits
The crisis of capitalism has fostered the rise of fascist parties across the globe, as we’re seeing from Spain to India. In Europe, many fascist parties have been gaining ground, playing on the disappointments and suffering of workers who have been subjected to unemployment and government cutbacks in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis that continues to widen. From Italy to Hungary to the UK and beyond, parties have used anti-immigrant racism, “anti-corruption” promises and anti-communist rhetoric. Their Klan-type racism fueled violence against immigrants fleeing inter-imperialist war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The use of nationalism and racism against immigrants and Muslims, and antigay and antisexist ideas are consistent features of fascism across the globe.
In Spain, the fascist virus has reared its ugly head in the form of Vox (Latin for “voice”). Emerging in 2013 as a split from the traditional right-wing Partitdo Popular (People’s Party). Vox openly supports Israeli fascism and advocates war against Iran. Vox’s current boss, Santiago Abascal, launched the 2019 campaign in Covadonga, the site of the first victory of Christian Spain against Muslims who governed the Spanish peninsula for over 780 years. He is calling for “making Spain great again” via mass deportation of Muslim workers. Abascal also wants to build a long wall on Spain’s southern border to stop migrants from Morocco and other parts of Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa who are fleeing war and environmental catastrophe. Vox unabashedly evokes the legacy of Franco, the Spanish dictator who ruled for over 40 years, and longs for a return to authoritarian rule under the banner of Spanish ultra-nationalism.
Vox is part of a broader fascist movement that has been building in Europe and worldwide. Steve Bannon, ex-strategist of the Donald Trump administration, founded an organization called “The Movement” to promote nationalist groups in Europe. Parties under this banner include the Belgian People’s Party, Italy’s Northern League, France’s National Front, Alternative for Germany, the Danish People’s Party and The Freedom Party of Austria.
What goes unmentioned in liberal analyses of Vox is that it’s the conditions caused by capitalism that provide the fertile ground upon which fascist parties can grow. These groups are a political response of one section of the capitalist class to the circumstances and obstacles of capitalism in crisis. This section of the ruling class is unwilling to make sacrifices for global imperialism. They are in conflict with the finance wing, which has been on the defensive from Europe to Asia to Latin America. The volatility of the capitalist world order is rapidly increasing.
Who will lead the fight?
We would be misleading ourselves if we think a movement absent of communist politics can steer a fight against fascism. Since December of 2018, the southern region of Andalucía has seen militant protests opposing attacks on immigrants and Vox. In cities like Granada, Sevilla, and Málaga, these groups have shut down streets and occupied central areas of the city with shouts of “We are not afraid” and “It’s fascism, not democracy,” and “Refugees welcome.” The main liberal wings of the bosses seek to control and steer this movement. What we need to keep in mind is that all liberal politicians are loyal servants of the main wing of their ruling class. Their job is to mislead and pacify angry workers, and to keep them on the dead-end road of capitalist electoral politics.
Just as it was in the period before World War II, the answer to a fascist international is a communist international, which makes the struggle against anti-immigrant racism, nationalism, and other oppressive and divisive ideas the key to building the unity necessary to defeat rising fascism. However, the old movement made a grave mistake in forming a united front against fascism—essentially failing to separate itself from the liberal bosses. PLP is trying to build a communist international movement that is independent from all bosses’ camps.
The capitalist bosses will always demonstrate significant tactical and strategic differences. However, they are united in the fundamental principle of attacking the working class at all costs and will achieve that through increased exploitation as well as racist and sexist attacks. However, it is our duty to continue to expose the liberals as the main threat to the international working class for their role in ensuring the survival of the profit system.
