Manlio Argueta’s novel One Day of Life (1980) about the exploitation of peasants by the U.S.-backed landlord government of El Salvador confronts capitalist rationalizations. It specifically counters U.S. support for fascist terror and murder, and the anticommunist ideology used to justify it.
The novel’s subject is severe exploitation in the Marxist sense – value taken from the peasants’ labor by keeping their standard of living so low that many children die of starvation. Exploitation is enforced by terror and legitimized by branding all peasants who do anything to raise their income as communists and, therefore, legitimate targets for torture and murder.
Traditional Roman Catholicism is used by the exploiters to train the peasants in fatalistic acquiescence. After the 2nd Vatican Council in the early 1960s “new priests” arrive, they teach the peasants to form buyers’ and sellers’ co-operatives that raise their standard of living. Then the National Guardsmen start to patrol Chalate, asking about the “communist priests.” The Guard tortures one of the “new priests” and we hear no more about them.
The U.S. Army Special Forces, the “Green Berets,” train the National Guardsmen in terror, torture, and murder. They feed them a U.S. diet to bulk them up, so that they look and feel superior to the peasants who cannot afford protein.
This primes the young peasant recruits to accept their indoctrination which is:
“any peasant unsatisfied with his traditional poverty-stricken life is a communist and “enemy of democracy.”
“true religion” comes from the United States, in the form of fundamentalist Protestant sects, which are imported from the United States to re-indoctrinate the peasants in fatalism and anticommunism.
peasants are poor not because they are exploited but because (a) they are part Indian, and “all Indians are lazy”; (b) there are too many peasants, because “all women are wh*res.”
Two chapters, “The Authorities” and “Them,” represent Argueta’s attempt to depict the ideology of a young peasant man who is successfully indoctrinated by the U.S. to terrorize, torture, and kill peasant families from his own village. The U.S. can trainers pound anticommunism, machismo, racism, and fundamentalist Protestantism into the heads of the trainees.
Education is used to identify peasant candidates for the National Guard. The Guardsman has made it through 6th grade, and so is recruited to be a fascist killer—another example of how capitalist education serves only the interests of the rich by indoctrinating the working class with sexist, racist and imperialist ideas to keep us divided.
Exploitation of the poor by the rich is the central theme. Lupe Guardado, the main narrator, comes to understand that the peasants are poor BECAUSE the landowners are rich. She is instructed by Chepe, her husband, Justino, her son, and Helio, her son-in-law, all of whom are tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen.
Before he is tortured and murdered by the U.S.-trained National Guardsmen, Chepe tells Lupe that God is conscience, and conscience is the poor. In short, “God is the poor.” The struggle of life is not to gain paradise after death, but to win a paradise on earth.
The “paradise” we need to struggle for is an egalitarian communist world where the capitalist ideas of sexism and racism are rejected and workers share the fruits of their own labor.
Through this novel, readers are introduced to the essential evil of the capitalist system, and the realities of U.S. brutality, mass murder, and exploitation in Latin America.
CHICAGO, March 30—Anti-deportation community organizers from three different Midwest states met in a forum to share their struggles and successes against the capitalist bosses’ racist mass detention and deportation machine.
The forum demonstrated that even small collectives of committed anti-racist fighters can effectively shut down the fascist plans of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison profiteers, especially when they are committed to long-term struggle and building a base in working-class neigborhoods.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) put forth a communist perspective on the movement against racist deportations. We stressed the importance of connecting the fights against the bosses’ racist attacks on both Latin workers and Black workers as we build a movement against the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses us all.
Learning through the mass work
The focus of the event was to summarize the work of three fightback groups, including the groups of several Party members, and discuss ways that their continued support of each other could be beneficial. The forum was organized by a local collective with deep ties in immigrant neighborhoods around Chicago’s west side. The struggles shared today spanned as far back as 2012, taking place across Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.
Organizers from Illinois discussed how they were able to defeat a proposal to build an immigrant prison in the small rural town of Crete in 2012, by utilizing mass media and organizing a three-day march from Chicago to the town in order to build opposition. Their efforts coincided with mass anti-NATO demonstrations that were happening in Chicago at the time, and therefore were able to draw support from other anti-capitalist fighters.
Workers from Indiana shared their efforts organizing in the majority-Black city of Gary to defeat a similar proposal to build an immigration prison. By drawing a wide base of support from many organizations, including faith-based groups, workers and community organizers, they were able to build a protracted campaign against local politicians and the GEO Group, a private prison corporation.
They discussed how their struggle was boosted by the surge in national anti-racist fightback inspired by the anti-racist rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Comrades in this group talked about how their communist politics directed both their actions and line within the organization, and their collective base-building among other workers.
Members from a prison abolition organization in Michigan then detailed their recent success in preventing a prison from being built in a small town in western Michigan. They explained how the private prison corporations intentionally target smaller, economically-devastated towns with majority-white populations, and try to build support by the promise of “bringing jobs.”
A key theme tonight centered on the liberal racism and anti-working class politics of non-profit immigrant rights groups. These groups are funded by and march in lockstep with the Democratic Party. Numerous instances were brought up in which organizations such as the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) intentionally withheld information about the prison proposals and sought to undermine more radical and anti-racist efforts to oppose the prisons.
Liberal reforms will never end the racist attacks against immigrant workers because reforms seek to steer the struggle into electoral politics and ultimately win more workers into supporting the capitalist system. The bosses’ liberal fascism must be countered with a bold message of communist revolution, which seeks to unite all workers into a movement to destroy this system which profits off the detention and deportation of our class sisters and brothers.
Building working-class consciousness
Fighters also discussed the ongoing work and lessons they’ve continued to learn. PL’ers said class struggle teaches the working class to fight and build a higher class-consciousness. Wins and losses are short-lived due to the nature of the reform. The ultimate goal has to be smashing the capitalist system that keeps workers and students on this hamster wheel of reformism.
Fighting alongside the masses against the bosses, their cronies, and their institutions is a mandatory step in building revolutionary consciousness and resolve. Equally mandatory is sharing these experiences in communal spaces and continuing to be bold about the line, including distributing CHALLENGE.
Our collective knowledge and skills in fighting immigrant prisons is set to be tested once again, as the mayor and town council of the small town of Dwight, Illinois have tentatively approved the construction of a detention center by Immigrant Centers of America.
Onward to another battle against the racist capitalists! Onward to international communist revolution!
NEW YORK CITY, April 1—The daily oppression that workers face is what makes capitalism a system worthy of destruction. From the mistreatment on public benefit lines to outright abuse in job centers, the everyday racism that Black and Latin women workers face is proof that capitalism does not serve us.
We continue to witness how the enforcers of the system—the police, security guards—scare and discipline the working class into staying in line. We also witness how public service workers who are hired to serve their class sisters and brothers are won to doing the opposite. Under capitalism, jobs that are meant to be helpful turn into the opposite.
Only under communism can we organize a society that is designed to serve, not oppress, the working class.
Mother wants benefits for child, gets terrorized instead
Headley took her baby boy to a public benefits office to investigate why the City stopped paying for the baby to go to daycare while she worked cleaning offices. Instead, the City took away her child and arrested her.
She had waited for over two hours only to find that it would take another week to reconnect her childcare allowance. To find out the status of her November application for cash allowance she had to take another number. There were no seats in the waiting room, so Headley could only sit on the floor next to her baby’s carriage. A security guard viciously ordered her to get up and, in ten minutes, returned with two cops. She picked up her child and rose to her feet. The cop threatened to take her to central booking and her son to the City child welfare agency. When she expressed anger and turned to go, the cop lunged at her. Two cops restrained her while two guards stripped her shrieking child out of her arms.
The capitalist liberal New York Times admits that this kind of abuse is not unusual. What the Times does not admit is that U.S. capitalism was born out of the racist slave trade and slavery and today capitalism all over the world still cannot exist without constant racist oppression.
Racism takes a heavy toll
Similarly, one of Progressive Labor Party, a single mother of a seven-year old, has endured this kind of racist mistreatment for years. She has suffered a continual series of terminations, denials, and, reapplications. Currently, she is expecting to be denied a huge portion of what is owed her for back underpayments, and may not get her tax refund because she didn’t provided several documents—all discovered after hours and days wasted traveling and waiting.
Many kinds of daily abuses against workers are repeated millions of times around the world. Whether it’s being bombed in Yemen by U.S. made bombs, or detained in concentration camps at the U.S./Mexico border while separated from your children, or getting arrested while applying for benefits for your child in New York City, capitalism has got to go.
The defenders of the system
Recently our comrade witnessed a similar horror scene at a job center in Manhattan. A young Latin woman entered and walked up to the customer service window with a brief question. The representative rudely responded, “Do not ask me anything. Go and stand in line!” Angered, the young worker persisted, and in three minutes four cops and three security goons rushed from the back room to detain her. In the process she was thrown to the floor and her head was slammed against the wall. They escorted her outside to be arrested.
The PL’er and about 20 other bystanders were warned that if they recorded this racist outrage on cell phones, their cases would be closed and they would be kicked out of the center.
Make friends, march on May Day, and fight back
The PL’er said, “I try to make contacts whenever I have to go for services or references. I try to follow up these new friends, along with family and old friends giving them CHALLENGEs. I stress that marching on May Day will build the movement we need to fight back against this oppression and finally to end it for good. We need to take over the world and build a society planned and run by working people.”
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Somalia bombings: U.S. imperialism shows its weakness
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- 24 March 2019 468 hits
Somalia is seeing an increase in lethal U.S. drone strikes, with 47 attacks killing 326 people over the last third of 2018 (New York Times, 3/10). These terror bombings are an essentially defensive response by a weakening U.S. imperialist state trying to counter the ascendant superpower China in East Africa. While both factions of the U.S. ruling class know they must try to contain China’s influence, the bosses’ main wing, the finance capitalists, should know that bombing with no boots on the ground is not a winning formula.
This U.S. is targeting al-Shabab, a band of small capitalists who use religion to justify their own bombings and murders of Somalians and Kenyans (see box). The U.S. is backing the current Somali regime against the al-Shabab insurgency to keep its imperialist toehold in the country. President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed is a dual Somali and U.S. citizen who until recently worked at the New York State Department of Transportation in Buffalo. He is seen as a willing collaborator with the U.S. (Politico, 2/19/17).
Somalia is a desperately poor country with huge geopolitical importance. It is located in the Horn of Africa, a gateway to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean. Besides controlling possibly the longest stretch of coast in Africa, Somalia borders Djibouti, where the Chinese are building a military base for 10,000 troops. Just across the Gulf of Aden lies the devastation of Yemen, where the U.S.-backed Saudis are waging a vicious war on Yemeni workers to maintain control of the Arabian peninsula. Close to five million barrels of crude oil move each day through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Djibouti and Eritrea. The narrow strait is a potential chokepoint for goods on the trade route between Asia and Europe, including critical energy supplies (bloomberg.com, 7/26/18). This on the cheap strategy to prop up Mohamed as a U.S. puppet, and bomb Al-Shabab won’t be enough to defeat Chinese imperialism.
Horn of Africa eyed by rival imperialists
The New York Times, U.S. finance capital’s leading mouthpiece, claims that “the intensifying bombing campaign undercuts the Trump administration’s intended pivot to confront threats from great powers like China and Russia, and away from long counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns.” Instead of increased bombing, main-wing analysts like the Atlantic Council’s Bronwyn Bruton are arguing for:
Negotiation with al-Shabab, which is expanding the territory under its control.
Ending support for the Somali government, which has a long history of corruption.
Partnering with Gulf States like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are already training Somalia’s military, and allowing them to negotiate with al-Shabab as well (Michigan Daily, 3/13/19).
This liberal counterstrategy exposes the growing weakness of the U.S. position in East Africa. Gone are the days when the U.S. had unlimited resources to impose its will throughout the world. The Vietnam Syndrome, the U.S. bosses’ inability to mobilize worker’s support for land-based military incursions, is alive and well. The rulers’ choices today? Ineffectual bombing or simply staying out of the way to regroup for an inevitable World War III.
Meanwhile, China has increased its trade with Africa by 226 percent over the past 12 years and tripled its foreign direct investment between 2011 and 2016 (Economist, 3/7). In December 2018, the Chinese bosses made a two-year deal for exclusive fishing rights in Somalia’s rich waters. They have also agreed to lend money to the Somali government to rebuild the Mogadishu seaport (Daily Sabah, 2/19). More and more, the Horn of Africa looms as the site of a potential proxy war between China and the U.S.
Second-tier imperialist powers are also vying to continue to exploit and control Africa. French President Emmanuel Macron recently made his tenth visit to the continent in two years, stopping at the French military base in Djibouti as well as Ethiopia and Kenya. The French bosses are allied with the U.S., at least for now. Macron recognizes that “Beijing is aiming to reshape the global order in its interests” and has “made countering China’s growing economic and military power a priority for this year”(Bloomberg, 3/12).
U.S. strategy looks like a loser
Over the past 15 years, drone strikes have become a favored option for the U.S. to flex its military might while minimizing the need for ground troops. Barack Obama bombed multiple countries with drones, including Somalia, during his eight years in office. Donald Trump is continuing this strategy while hiding it from view. The State Terrorist in Chief recently declared that the CIA would no longer make public the number of drone strikes or related fatalities (BBC, 3/7).
In 2017, the U.S. suspended military aid to most Somali units as Trump authorized the first deployment of regular U.S. troops to the country since 1994. There are now approximately 500 U.S. military personnel stationed there (Council on Foreign Relations, 1/31)—nowhere near the number needed to consolidate control of Somalia or challenge the growing Chinese presence in Djibouti. Trump’s minimal troop mobilization, coupled with the dramatic increase in bombings of forcibly recruited teenagers in al-Shabab, is hardly a strategy to win the hearts and minds of Somali workers.
A lose-lose conflict for workers
As Somali workers are bombed by terrorists on both sides, from above by U.S. drones and on the ground by al-Shabab suicide bombers, their only solution is communist revolution. The only way to stop imperialist slaughter is by building a red army to seize state power in all the countries of the world. All power to the international working class!
CHICAGO, March 12-Dozens of protesters, including Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members, blocked City Hall elevators for nine hours to protest the $95 million police training academy to be built on Chicago’s impoverished West Side. This is on top of the $1.5 billion yearly budget for the police (Chicago City Budget) and the $113 million the city spent on police misconduct lawsuits in 2018 (The Chicago Reporter, 3/7).
The Chicago City Council nevertheless approved this expenditure, showing once again that the job of all politicians and cops is to “serve and protect” their billionaire capitalist masters.Workers don’t need “better trained” cops that will control us and stop us from fighting back more effectively. We don’t need politicians bought and controlled by billionaires and their lobbyists and their bribes.We need a system where we run society for the working class and by the working class. That’s communism. But to organize such a society we must fight racism and sexism. We must unite our class into a multi-racial force that can overthrow the capitalists. This is why PLP organizes for communist revolution.
This militant action was led by young Black and Latin organizers in the #NoCopAcademy campaign, which has been fighting for Schools not Cops, Clinics not Cops, Jobs not Cops, and to End Police Murder since the plan to build the Cop Academy was first announced two years ago. Participants were prepared to be arrested, but no one was, in spite of a heavy police presence throughout the day. Evidently Chicago’s lame duck Mayor Rahm Emanuel feared arrests would bring more attention to the phony election campaign.
The day was filled with chanting (No Cop A-ca-demy, 95 mil for commun-ity. Say What?), stopping people from coming on or off elevators, marching, and individual conversations. This gave PLers the opportunity to talk about our upcoming May Day march and dinner and to make connections with those interested in further discussing the necessity of communist revolution. The protest continued the next day at the City Council meeting. The City Council voted to borrow $65 million to pay for the Academy, meaning the working class will end up paying three times that in interest.
Capitalists will always spend money on police to protect themselves from the working class while cutting funds for schools, jobs, housing, and health clinics that the working class needs. The capitalist politicians also make sure they hire their “friends,” regardless of competence. The contract for the Cop Academy is going to AECOM, a company whose history is riddled with scandals including use of deficient materials, fraudulent billing, inflated cost projections, and over-charges. A member of AECOM’s Board gave $50,000 to Emanuel’s re-election campaign (The Chicago Reporter, January 24). Capitalists are happy to give their cronies money extorted from the working class in the form of taxes.
The struggle continues. The reform battle to stop the Academy may be lost, but the courage, the solidarity, and the multi-racial unity that these fighters built and experienced cannot be taken away from them. PLP will continue to participate in the many anti-racist struggles to come and person-by-person, we will win millions to fight for communism.
