MEXICO—Sometimes the targets of state terror are outright murdered or disappeared, like in the cases of the Ayotzinapa 43 or Mike Brown of Ferguson. Other times, the targets live to witness the perpetrators get off the hook.
That was the case in 2006 for over 40 women protesters in San Salvador Atenco who had been captured, abused, and tortured by police.
Eleven of those women have now come out to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about the sexist violence unleashed on them by the government. They were raped, beaten, openly humiliated, and then denied medical care. Not one of the nearly two dozen cops involved have been convicted.
The governor overseeing these atrocities was none other than the current president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto. The New York Times admits it is “unlikely that Mr. Peña Nieto’s government will conduct an investigation into whether he knew of or covered up the assaults.” The only impact this court ruling will have is a “deep embarrassment for [Nieto]” (9/22). Embarrassment will not stop the daily harassment, exploitation, and terrorization of women workers!
Prosecuting the Victim
“Rather than go after the police who committed the sexual torture, the state initially prosecuted the women. Five were imprisoned for a year or more, on charges like blocking traffic, detentions the commission found arbitrary…Mr. Peña Nieto told a local newspaper at the time that it was a known tactic of radical groups to have women make accusations of sexual violence to discredit the government” (NYT, 9/22)
The capitalist state first terrorizes and then criminalizes the targets of sexism. This double assault on women workers reveals just how central sexism is to maintaining state terror. Terrorizing those who have been super-exploited is one the bosses’ ways to ensure women don’t fight back and give leadership. This also acts as a setback for the whole working class. Without the leadership of working-class women, the movement against capitalism is crippled. The bosses understand this.
Women’s Place Is to Fight Back
The state’s resolve to terrorize women reveals another truth—when women fight back, shoulder to shoulder with working-class men, the bosses shake in fear. The 40 Atenco women were captured at a protest. This fact points to the distinct role working-class women play in the path to liberation from wage slavery.
Women, especially Black and Latin women, often provide some of the most militant leadership when it comes to fighting the bosses and their racist, sexist system, so the bosses need to terrorize women to stop them. In Mexico, women workers are leading the struggle in Oaxaca against the fascist attacks on teachers and students. In Baton Rouge, Black women made up the majority of the fighters against the police. In Brooklyn, Black women are leading the rallies and events against police terror.
No Profit, No Basis for Sexism
President Nieto’s attack on women fighters is typical in a system designed to super-exploit and oppress working-class women. Sexism equals billions of extra dollars in profits for the bosses because women are paid lower wages at work and women are responsible for unpaid labor at home in the form of childcare, cooking, and cleaning.
With a communist revolution, the working class army will abolish wages, capitalism, and the bosses’ state. There will be no more distinction between unpaid and paid labor, thus eliminating the material basis for sexism. Every member of society will share in the raising of children and other tasks that capitalism teaches us are “women’s work.” There will be no basis for unequal pay or benefits. All will receive according to their need, organized through a workers’ government.
Anything short of communism means women will continue to be exploited, abused, and terrorized. The Progressive Labor Party organizes in 27 countries to smash this sexist system. Join the fight!
BROOKLYN, September 26—The protesters moved out into the middle of the street, stopping traffic on Church Avenue on Sept 21. Kyam Livingston’s mother, Anita, echoed many of the speeches made at this demonstration when she said, “We need this struggle to end the killings. Voting won’t do it.” Members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were at this rally with our newspaper Challenge. We encouraged people to join the lifelong struggle for communism, a society run by the working class that will end racism and sexism once and for all. The demonstrators then released balloons and Kyam’s mother said an invocation to her daughter’s memory.
This demonstration marked the 38th month after the killing of Kyam Livingston who died under police custody in a Brooklyn holding cell. It was a large demonstration. There are always people standing on the street listening to the speeches and chants, but this time there was a larger than usual crowd on all the street corners. Many of those people crossed the street to stand with us. The crowd gave donations to help continue the struggle and many took our revolutionary, communist newspaper, Challenge. It was the day after the world heard about the racist police murders of two more Black workers—one in Charleston and the other in Tulsa, Oklahoma. People were angry and wanted to listen about fighting back. A PL’er spoke about raising this struggle on our jobs, in our unions and communities, and at our schools. Let’s organize to fight back everywhere. We need persistence and consistency in going out with the message that racism kills and we need to fight back with multi-racial unity. Many people had tears in their eyes while they listened to the story of how Kyam was cruelly mistreated and ignored by her jailers when she became ill and was refused medical attention.
Some members of a local church attended this rally. At that same church, a discussion on Black Lives Matter took place the following Sunday. A number of the attendees were loud in their anger towards the continued racist terror and spoke of their desire to seek solutions. Many people said they would attend the next Justice for Kyam Livingston demonstration.
At this rally, all the speakers talked about the need for multiracial unity to end these racist killings. They said that all people of all backgrounds, should be involved in the struggle against racist violence because it hurts us all. A PLP member said that capitalism breeds racism. Capitalists need a divided working class to keep wages low and their profits high. The capitalists cannot continue their rule if all the workers unite and fight back. The speaker said that only communism would end this contradiction and called upon people to read and distribute Challenge and become communists. Only this will end racism once and for all.
The demonstrators and supporters were so excited by this rally that they kept talking for another half hour after the demonstration ended. It’s clear that people are fired up. It’s clear that the struggle will continue. We need justice for all the victims of police murder and we need a communist world for the working class. Join us!
COLOMBIA—We are a group of young students, unemployed, workers, and soccer players. We are tired of war, bureaucracy, hunger, unemployment, injustice, capitalist laws that serve the few, inequality, the grave economic crisis, and tricks of all kinds played against the working class. We saw the need to organize a work and revolutionary action collective, and through this undertake the political road to building a party. Since we did not have the ideological base and were politically disoriented, one of our first steps was to participate—at the invitation of PLP members—in the May 1st “International Worker’s Day” march.
More than 30 of our youth participated; and it was there among the loud chants and slogans that we were introduced to some of the party’s ideas. Many of our comrades saw this as the organization and line we needed. So amid the debates and the literature we began to learn, and have since formed a new CHALLENGE readers’ group with 12 members.
This summer, we participated in a PLP meeting about working-class internationalism. It was a joy to meet comrades from around the world, and to realize that, like here, comrades are doing serious work and revolutionary struggle to transform society. Thanks to this meeting, we are writing this piece. It is the first time that we have collectively written to the party on our own initiative.
We now participate in sporting and social events, trying to build a base for the Party’s ideas. We also take part in different forums and debates around the recent peace process between the government and Colombian revisionism (see page 2). By their actions, these fake leftists support the government, exploiting disarmament to derail working-class struggle and use this class collaboration to maintain the failing system of capitalism. Our position is that as long as there is capitalism, it is inevitable there will be war. It is for this reason we call on our friends and other militants not to vote at all, but rather to organize for a communist revolution and worker’s power.
We want the bosses to be warned. Every day we are more convinced about what we do, and the importance of the class struggle fills us with courage. We know full well the responsibility we have to win more youth to continue holding high the red communist banners, the banners of PLP. Forward, comrades of the world!
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A Workers’ History of Fake Leftists in Latin America
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- 13 October 2016 229 hits
With history as a guide, the current “peace” process between the Colombian government and the FARC will only lead to more misery for the working class. FARC, who had abandoned revolutionary struggle decades ago, will only serve as the new bosses in the capitalist government. We have seen this happen in a number of Latin American countries. Below are just three examples.
Nicaragua’s Sandinistas
In 1979, in Nicaragua, the so-called “Marxist” rebel Sandinista army overthrew the U.S.-backed fascist regime of Anastasio Somoza. Somoza’s family had long ruled Nicaragua under the command of Citigroup, the U.S. ruling class’ most powerful bank. After the Sandinista uprising, the U.S. bosses used the profits of weapons sales to Iran (provoking the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war) to finance an army of death squads in Nicaragua, called the “Contras.”
The ensuing civil war was coordinated directly by the CIA. The Contras also began growing cocaine – which first made its way to the streets of Black neighborhoods in the U.S. during this period. Following a brave mass fightback against tens of thousands of deaths, and even more raped and tortured by the Contras, the Sandinistas agreed to a ceasefire deal and “open” elections in 1990. Instead of organizing the masses around fighting for a workers’ dictatorship, the Sandinistas agreed to participate in the capitalist dictatorship’s “free and fair” elections. They were immediately voted out of power by a coalition of CIA-financed parties.
For the next 16 years, with the Sandinistas as the “official” parliamentary opposition, Nicaragua dropped to becoming the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. Under the presidency of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega since 2006, half of all children and adolescents live in poverty. There were 240,000 workers between the ages of five and 17 in the early 2000s(The Guardian, 5/19/15).
El Salvador’s FMLN
In El Salvador throughout the 1980s, a heroic armed struggle led by the “Marxist” Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN) fought the fascist U.S.-backed government. CIA and Pentagon-trained death squads slaughtered more than 70,000 workers, and raped, tortured, and mutilated tens of thousands more. The FMLN’s armed struggle defended and was supported by the working class. Instead of seizing state power for the working class, they followed the pattern of the Sandinista class traitors, and surrendered, negotiating participation in the capitalist government. After consecutive FMLN Presidents, every one out of three workers lives below the poverty line. Crime and gang activity continue to bring misery to the working class, making it the murder capital of the world.
Guatemala’s URNG
In Guatemala, following a 36-year insurgency following the CIA coup in 1954, the “Marxist” Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) led an armed struggle against the fascist U.S.-backed regime for 36 years. In 1987, they entered UN-sponsored “peace” negotiations. They became a legal political party in 1998. With U.S. president Bill Clinton making a vague reference to the “dark” decades of U.S. atrocities there, the URNG misleaders won the Nobel Peace Prize. Currently, about 60 percent of Guatemalan workers live in poverty. Like El Salvador and Honduras, millions of workers are leaving the country because of the gang wars created by capitalism.
According to Jay Root of the Texas Tribune,On top of gang violence, there is staggering income inequality, high youth unemployment and low high school graduation rates, particularly in heavily indigenous Guatemala. About 60 percent of the people in Honduras and Guatemala live in poverty” (10/10).
According to the same article, “for the first time since records have been kept, more non-Mexicans than Mexicans were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol. That will almost certainly happen again in 2016, the latest figures indicate.”
Millions of workers bravely fought and died in these movements, believing they would lead to revolution. Participating in capitalist governments has only led to continued and increasing misery for the working class. It did bring power to the workers. PLP fights to organize the veterans of these struggles, and the heirs to their vision of a communist world. Only by building a mass, revolutionary communist party can we defeat the bosses once and for all.
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Attica Lives On National Prison Strike Enters Month 2
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- 13 October 2016 235 hits
TEXAS, October 9—The national prison strike is heading into its second month, prompting the Department of Injustice to make a show of an investigation in Alabama prisons.
To celebrate the 45th anniversary of the biggest prison rebellion in U.S. history at Attica, New York, thousands of worker-prisoners in 40 jailhouses covering 24 states went on a labor strike this past September 9. Outside groups helped prepare for this strike for months. The tremendous ability of workers to organize actions, even separated in different prisons, was deliberately blacked out by the major capitalist media.
A spokesperson for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, explained:
Overseers watch over our every move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking, we are punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.
Federal prisoners make 12 to 40 cents an hour, while many state prisoners are paid nothing. If anything has changed in the last 45 years, the exploitation and treatment of prisoners is now worse. There’s an increase of overcrowding and convictions for the victimless crime of drug possessions, for which no other imperialist country imprisons its population.
In preparation for this nationwide strike, there have been many smaller local strikes over the last few months in prisons throughout the U.S. Prisoners realize that without their labor—cooking, cleaning, and maintenance—prisons come to a halt. Private manufacturing and commercial corporations also exploit their labor, in conditions approximating outright slavery.
Prison Labor is Slavery
In Douglas Blackmon’s 2008 book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, he described this altered but continued form of slavery. But it didn’t end with World War II, as it continues in force today with the highest prison population in the world, both absolutely and proportionately. U.S. prisons house 2.2 million men and women, with Black and Latin workers disproportionately represented, due to the racist injustice system, but with roughly comparable total numbers of white workers. But today unity across racial lines led by Black prisoners stands out just as it did in the 1971Attica rebellion.
Mass imprisonment was revived with the “War on Crime” begun during the Johnson administration in the 1960s and continued with Bill Clinton’s tremendous acceleration of incarceration and enlargement of city police forces around the country—both liberal Democrat presidents. Both liberals and conservatives push for racist increases in prison populations, whether through “law and order” campaigns, “war on drugs,” or other forms of mass incarceration. We have only ourselves, the working class, to rely on.
Exploitation and extreme oppression of workers, both inside and outside of prisons, will only end when millions of workers everywhere join and help to build the PLP to lead a global revolution to rid the world of capitalism. In its place, we must organize a worldwide communist system run by workers, for the benefit of humanity as a whole (minus the former bosses and their supporters). Communism will be based on our vital needs, with no possibility of profitmaking.
