As school returns to session for parents, students, and teachers across the northern hemisphere, readers of CHALLENGE and millions more aim to make the fight against racism a central part of the coming year. Donald Trump’s embrace of Nazi and KKK scum in the wake of Charlottesville is the most open show of support for racism from the White House since Woodrow Wilson screened the pro-Klan film, “Birth of a Nation,” a hundred years ago.
Teachers = Education Workers
Teachers and others determined to bring the struggle against racism into the schools today have much to learn from the efforts of communist teachers in New York City in the 1930s-1950s.
The NYC city school system expanded at breakneck pace in the early twentieth century, as the NYC ruling class absorbed millions of economic refugees migrating from Southern and Eastern Europe, and later, Black migrants from the Southern U.S.
In contrast to the majority of their students who faced mass racist unemployment, underemployment, incarceration, or the military, teachers’ salaries provided a decent standard of living.
Irrespective of salary, however, teachers remained, and are, exploited workers, alongside their students and all other workers. Teachers in the 1930s fought back on this basis, and as they did, two tendencies in teacher unionism emerged. One tendency in teacher unionism involved organizing teachers as professionals and pursuing collaborative relations with administrators and the Board of Education, with the aim of persuading school bosses to make incremental improvements to teacher working conditions. It was argued that the ripple effect of these improvements would also serve the interests of students. This tendency lives on in the leadership of the two major U.S. teacher unions: the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).
The other tendency in teacher unionism was led by communists to organize teachers as workers. Teachers would fight for school improvements alongside students and parents, and organize entire neighborhoods to feel the strength of collective action by demanding changes at their local school. Rooted in the working class masses, a citywide teacher’s union movement grew: New York City Teachers’ Union (TU).
From its inception, the TU launched mass antiracist campaigns in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg and the South Bronx against abusive school principals, for repairs to dilapidated school buildings, and for the staffing of Black and Latin schools with experienced teachers.
Communist Call to Teachers: Serve the People
In the 1930s and ‘40s, the communist-led Teachers’ Union (TU) was the leading teachers’ organization in the city. The city bosses were careful to never recognize this union as the official bargaining representative of the city’s teachers. Nevertheless the TU launched fights to reduce class size and ban gender discrimination in teacher hiring (which lost and won fights to make statutory racial segregation illegal in New York State), due process for probationary and licensed teachers, and the establishment of nursery schools under existing boards of education statewide.
The TU struggled to win teachers to join antiwar, antifascist, social and unemployment committees. Beyond filing grievances, teachers were struggled with to join labor history, academic freedom, educational policy and finance committees. All communist-led efforts worked to deepen the commitment of teachers to the working class in general and the Black working class in particular.
A featured column by Howard University professor Doxey Wilkerson in the March, 1938 edition of the TU newspaper, New York Teacher, laid out the stakes of the fight against segregated schooling in New York City:
“Wilkerson argued that the New York City educational system assured that blacks [sic] would remain locked in America’s caste hierarchy. Despite the lack of de jure racial racism in the North, racism nonetheless was still a reality, and the institution where it reared its ugly head the highest was the school system…Wilkerson declared that a deliberate ‘mental crucifixion’ of black children was taking place. In schools in Harlem black students were not allowed to use the swimming pools, were assigned seats in the back of the classroom and were excluded from extracurricular activities and social events. Thus, the Negro child is made to realize that he is not an integral part of the social group with which he is thrown, but rather, that he is a thing apart, isolated, ostracized, somehow not quite like his classmates
—Reds at the Blackboard, Clarence Taylor
As World War II approached, the TU characterized Northern Jim Crow as American Nazism and overt acts of racism as actions of a fifth column—a domestic force committed to the victory of Hitler’s Germany.
Fascists Light the Fires; Liberals Bring the Fuel
From the moment the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 achieved communist victory, the U.S. ruling class kicked into overdrive a long tradition of vicious anti-labor warfare that included repeated state-directed massacres of striking workers. Alien and Sedition Acts revoked legal protections of suspected revolutionaries. The Schenck v. U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing imprisonment of anti-imperialist street speakers and the raids organized by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, resulted in the largest mass deportation of political radicals in U.S. history.
This anticommunist crusade continued in NYC schools, crossing Democratic and Republican city governments and peaked in the 1950s. Loyalty oaths for teachers imposed during World War I were updated with anticommunist language. The early ‘40s saw the assault of the NY state Rapp-Coudert committee, tasked with rooting out communist teachers, which resulted in the removal of over 40 professors from CUNY’s City College in Manhattan. Emboldened, in 1948 the bosses migrated their purge into the NYC public schools, and widened into documented investigation of over 1,100 teachers with over 400 being dismissed/retiring/resigning by the mid-1950s. The Teachers Union would hang on, with declining membership and influence until it disbanded in 1964.
Not a single teacher charged was found to be ineffective in the classroom or of indoctrinating students. On the contrary, these teachers tended to be highly regarded by colleagues and parents as especially dedicated to the mission of quality education for all. Parents, teachers, and community groups protested the first eight suspensions of communist teachers in 1948 with letters and meetings. Forty-eight teachers in Alice Citron’s Harlem school wrote to Jansen that Citron had “worked tirelessly on behalf of the children”; a parade of Harlem mothers testified to the same effect during the subsequent administrative trial of Citron and the seven others.
The national union leadership of the AFT assisted the ruling class in purging the school system of communist teachers in every phase. They even launched their own six-year effort to strip the TU of its charter for the offense of electing communists to union leadership, imposing it in 1941, against the wishes of thousands of NYC teachers who voted for a communist leadership. The AFT’s quiescence in the campaign to turn teachers into informants against each other through the ‘40s and ‘50s in NYC laid the basis for the emergence of the UFT in 1960-61.
Despite this deteriorating situation, the Teachers Union did not immediately disband. Instead, it launched campaigns to eliminate racist and bigoted textbooks from classrooms, hire more Black teachers and promote Black History Month. The TU remade itself into a leading voice in the New York City civil rights movement, by challenging the racially discriminatory polices of the Board of Education.
Weaknesses in the Work of the CPUSA in the Schools
After World War II, a lethal notion arose that the working class did not need a revolutionary communist party any more, that there could be “peaceful coexistence” between the Soviet Union and U.S. imperialism. The reasons for this retreat are discussed in numerous PLP documents, including Road to Revolution, I to IV.
The U.S. bosses were encouraged by the communist retreat, and launched another wave of anticommunist witch hunts in the 1950s. While communist teachers never let these purges derail mass antiracist organizing, these communists followed the international movement’s lead and retreated even further from revolution. Worldwide, the collapse of the international communist movement was underway.
Meanwhile, revolutionary communists formed the PLP and rose to inherit the strengths of the old Communist Party USA (CPUSA); this time, to fight all the way to communism! PL’ers knew then and new generations know now there can never be any “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism. As in the past, today’s communists are working to organize uncompromising struggle against racism and segregation in NYC schools. As the NYC Department of Education pursues a new effort to purge communists from the schools, the closing passage of Marx’s Manifesto of 1848 remains our guide: “The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”
Friends of PLP may view the ruling class’ attacks on communism as an absurd throwback to the 1950s. But capitalism’s failures are endemic: the drive toward war, compounding inequality, rising racism and fascism—these crises cry out for solution, and millions seek a way out. Communism remains that way out. The rulers know communism remains a threat, no matter how few in number the communists may be. Help lead society toward the day when workers like the brave members of the Teachers Union are in power—answer the bosses attacks by joining the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party!
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Mohamed Bah & Dwayne Jeune No Justice for Mentally Ill Workers under KKKapitalism
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- 01 September 2017 289 hits
New York City, August 22—It could be the open fascist terror of Nazis and Klansmen marching in Charlottesville with the tacit approval of the Racist In Chief. Or it could be the bosses’ “Klan in Blue” - cops who kill over 1000 working class people a year. Wherever we are, workers and students must fight back! Recently several Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades in a local congregation mobilized a group of protesters to join two anti-racist demonstrations.
Killers of Mohamed Still Off Scot-Free
We joined a multiracial coalition demanding that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York prosecute the cops who murdered Mohamed Bah five years ago. Mohamed was a college student and cab driver, and had a psychotic episode. His mother called for an ambulance to take him to a hospital. Instead of sending medical help, all they sent were cops. They refused her help in diffusing the situation, broke down the apartment door, and murdered Mohamed.
There is clear evidence of an execution and cover-up by the cops. Depositions have been taken to force prosecution by both the Manhattan District Attorney and the Federal prosecutor. Evidence has been ‘lost’ or contaminated. As we go to press we have just learned that the federal prosecutor refused to press any charges against the executioners of Mohamed Bah. No surprise! A civil suite still remains.
Dwayne, Murdered by Cops in his Apartment
The previous Saturday, several of us joined a multiracial demonstration of hundreds that gathered in front of the building where Dwayne Jeune, a 32-year-old, mentally ill worker was murdered by cops in his own apartment on July 31. The circumstances virtually identical to Mohamed Bah’s murder five years before. A lawyer representing the Jeune family, other victims’ families, and some community organizers gave speeches.
We need a lifelong commitment to a better world—communism! We then marched many blocks through Brooklyn’s Flatbush community to the precinct that had sent the killer-cops.
The cops are thugs for the racist billionaire bosses and their capitalists. To terrorize workers and stop any fightback, they have developed a particularly vicious pattern. Families seeking assistance for a relative suffering mental distress call for medical help. Instead of an ambulance, armed cops arrive. Without accepting help from the family, they provoke a confrontation “justifying” killing the victim.
As we help organize these anti-racist struggles, we must redouble our efforts to expose the entire capitalist system. The increasingly fascist criminal “justice” system will very rarely prosecute —and almost never convict—the cops that are actually carrying out the bosses’ plans of repression and terror. We must increase our organizing actions to shut down schools, work places and transportation. We will push back against fascist terror! And we will recruit more and more workers and students who understand that destroying this killer capitalist system with communist revolution is the only ultimate solution.
BROOKLYN, NY, August 19—Over a dozen multiracial, women and men members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party rallied in Brooklyn today with signs and leaflets that read “No Free Speech for Racists” and “Death to the Klan with Multiracial Unity.” In one hour, contacts were made, over 550 leaflets were distributed, and over 200 CHALLENGEs were sold at a busy street corner in the heart of this Black and immigrant neighborhood.
In particular, workers responded to the call for “death to the Klan from Charlottesville to New York City.” Many workers stopped to read the leaflet and discuss how we can organize; on one street corner, a worker helped advertise our leaflet and called other workers over to read a leaflet and buy a newspaper.
Even the Christian groups passing out their own literature listened to our discussions and took our leaflets. At one point a lively and friendly debate was held between a Black, religiously-minded woman worker and a white, communist-minded male worker in PLP. The debate was brought down to earth when the Black worker opened up about her disgust at the open revival of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis. Religious or not, masses of workers share this workers’ exasperation at what we can do about the Klan, apart from “having faith.”
The religious worker and the communist worker did not reach consensus on whether or not there is life after death. However, they both agreed in freeing workers - in this life - from the Klan, racial segregation, racist borders, and imperialist war. Both agreed in multiracial unity, and the need to organize and fight back. While clear disagreements regarding religious faith remain and cannot be casually dismissed, agreement on these points of unity in action can be important to our class in building a political base for the sharpening struggles to come. Hopefully this dialogue will continue developing into genuine friendship, based on antiracism and political struggle!
Above all, communists don’t write off or surrender whole sections of workers to the bosses’ ideas, ever; from white workers to Black workers to religious Christian and Muslim workers! All workers are hurt by racism, sexism, and imperialism, and capitalism uses its most vicious attacks on Black workers, especially women. Today more than ever, masses of them are looking for a way out. Charlottesville has sharpened the mood of the masses. For how long is impossible to predict, but the workers who took hundreds of leaflets and CHALLENGEs, who donated their money to our Party and shared their time to discuss politics and life, taught us we can return to work bolder. And, more confident that communist revolution is an idea whose time has come, if we persist and struggle to spread it.
Osip Piatnitsky was a revolutionary leader who played a key role in organizing the working class before, during, and after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Much of this three-part series was taken from his memoir, Memoirs of a Bolshevik. The first of the three-part series looked Piatnitsky’s early life and his role in guaranteeing communist propaganda, including the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra. The following part deals with his life while in prison and exile under Czarist Russia, leading up to the year of the Bolshevik Revolution—the first successful workers’ state in history. At every turn, any accomplishments were made possible by the masses and working collectively.
Early in March of 1902, Osip Piatnitsky was traveling with a comrade to secure the underground route to smuggling their newspaper, Iskra, from Germany to Russia. They were arrested and sent to the Kiev prison in Russia.
Inside the prison, hundreds of arrested students protested, creating such an uproar, crowds from the distant town came to the prison gates. It was in this prison that Piatnitsky had the time to be a teacher of Marxist literature. At age 17, he had four years of organizing.
The Great Escape from Kiev
Plans were made to escape. For weeks of preparation: getting ladders, a grapple, money, addresses in Kiev, practicing a human pyramid the height of the yard wall, singing in chorus, beating a tin can to mask the sound of the escapees climbing on the outside wall composed partly of tin, obtaining wine to get the guards drunk, and sleeping powder with which to keep them unconscious—all acquired from the outside.
Through collective organizing, they did escape! But the Kiev safe house addresses were wrong. They had to ride in cabs all night to avoid detection. Of the 11 men involved with Iskra, 10 survived the escape and arrived in Germany according to plan.
Odessa: Soldiers Unite
In January 1905, Piatnitsky arrived in Odessa. Prior to the January 22 uprising and march on the Tsar’s palace, he was arrested with others at a meeting. The police left soldiers to guard them. With the absence of gendarmes (French armed police) they tore up all papers. When the police returned, they questioned who had destroyed the papers. The soldiers replied, “EVERYBODY.”
The comrades and scores of others from all walks of politics remained imprisoned without trial for five months. When they were released pending a future trial, Piatnitsky decided not to appear at the trial and left for Moscow.
‘Recognized’ as Innocent
In 1907, many were arrested; detectives shadowing Piatnitsky increased. The Party suggested he leave Moscow. In his hometown, he was arrested. Due to the differences in his several passport pictures, the gendarmes couldn’t identify him. At this time, jails were filled with peasants and intellectuals rebelling against landlords. With ongoing tortures and staging of trials, keeping Piatnitsky’s identity safe also meant the safety of many others associated with him.
He was taken by foot to a town where he had never been, which had a notoriously vicious police chief. Several days later waiting in a cell where many had been tortured, he was called out to be recognized. He was “recognized” to be innocent by five people in that town who had never seen him before. On his way back to the cell, a stranger approached him and handed him five rubles. He realized relatives and friends had arranged the “recognition.”
Cheated by Provocateur
In June of 1914, betrayed by a provocateur who had deliberately photographed him in Paris with other comrades so he could be identified—Piatnitsky was arrested, put in solitary for 2.5 months and sentenced to Siberia. Before they were transferred, he heard that World War I had begun and recalled that the Russo-Japanese war brought on the 1905 revolts.
In January 1915, he and 60 other comrades and criminals were forced to march 250 miles. They spent their nights in peasant huts. Larger villages held many exiled political prisoners where the peasants received them warmly. Piatnitsky was forced to walk to the furthest village in Siberia: Fedino, because of his escape reputation from Kiev.
It Takes a Collective Village
Fedino was more prosperous than the villages they’d walked through and consisted of 40 households who cultivated land outside the village. The economy was not collective in the least; men and women of the same family kept separate accounts. No one was taught to read and write.
During the next two years, 23 exiles came to live in Fedino. A few condemned by administrative decrees received eight rubles a month. Deportees received nothing.
The exiles worked out communal dining, collective buying and fair division of food and provisions. To sustain their sanity, the exiles read material provided by the local “Congress of Exiles.” Piatnitsky taught children of the peasant family to read.
The snow at times was six feet deep. The last year, all staple articles disappeared from town markets. He organized a cooperative with the peasants, which was necessary for everyone’s survival.
On the evening of March 9, 1917, he lay in his room in the dark without answering the door, the only time in his memoir he admitted depression. Late that evening, an exile from outside Fedino rushed in to announce that a bourgeoisie revolution had taken place in Russia (the February Revolution). Piatnitsky had one burning question: which party would organize more quickly—the party leading the proletariat and the peasantry or the party of the bourgeoisie?
Later the peasants of Fedino handed Piatnitsky the village seal and all the attributes of the office of “guard.” After leaving for Moscow, he learned that during the remainder of 1917 Fedino peasants, led by exiles who remained there, took an active part in the guerilla battles against Kolchak bands.
Security: Build the Party
As we saw, Piatnisky’s safety lay in the hands of the masses. Be it escaping from prison, falling under the police radar, or bare survival, it was possible when class-consciousness is planted deep and wide. Likewise, the security of communist work today lay in the hands of the working class—all communists and friends must build a base wherever they are: work, school, military, farm, or prison.
A third and final article will deal with some reasons why a revolution did not take place in the trade-union-organized country of Germany, as Marx predicted. The contrast of political life in Germany to the revolts in Odessa, and the struggle between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks over the publishing of the paper in Samara (near St. Petersburg) will reflect the intensification of repression in Russia from 1908 through 1914.
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NO FREE SPEECH FOR RACISTS! DEATH TO THE KLAN WITH MULTIRACIAL UNITY
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- 15 August 2017 315 hits
KKK and Nazi fascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, have murdered antiracist fighter Heather Heyer as the local ruling class used their state power to protect these racists. They deployed hundreds of kkkops in riot ge
click image for leafletar to protect their banks and racist monuments, only intervening after it became clear the antiracist students and workers were bloodying the fascists.
Whether the president is Obama or Trump, this exercise of state power – and the Nazi murder - proves again that racism is critical to the life of capitalism.
State Terror Unleashed on Antiracist Students and Workers
It’s no surprise that the bosses use their cops to protect the KKK instead. Since the founding of this country, racism was used to justify slavery. Numerous local, state and federal laws passed over centuries were required to entrench racist divisions inside the working class, and weaken our ability to fight back against our exploitation. The most vicious state terror was used by police on working people who insisted on struggling together against exploitation (see Lerone Bennett’s “Road Not Taken” on the lynch law of colonial era, as well as the Hollywood film “Free State of Jones” on the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War.)
When kkkops are brought out against the antiracists, they function in this capitalist tradition. As the PLP chant goes: “the cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan: all are part of the bosses’ plan.”
The mayor of Charlottesville called on residents to stay away from the rally- as if nonviolence defeated the Confederacy! He tried to encourage workers to attend alternate events orchestrated by NAACP misleaders. Whenever the KKK or Nazis rear their ugly head, these liberal misleaders and churches try to keep the working class from fighting back.
When the Klan is confronted by multiracial fightback, they are terrified.
The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a 52-year history of beating them back and driving them out of our streets and neighborhoods!
The militancy of thousands of antiracists shows the potential of our working class to go all the way. When masses of workers reject passivity and organize multiracial fightback against gutter racists and the racism of capitalism, we can smash capitalism and its racist borders - and their servants, the Obamas, the Trumps, and the KKK - with armed revolution.
Turning the fight against imperialism, racism, sexism, and nationalism into an international fight for a working-class run society—communism—is the only way to once and for all smash the horrors of this imperialist, racist and sexist capitalist system. Fight back! JOIN US!
