Last month’s impeachment of Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, is a sharp reminder that capitalist reforms and sell-out politicians can never serve the needs of the international working class. The political coup against Rousseff and her fake-left, deceptively named “Workers’ Party” points to an escalation of the fight between two camps of Brazilian finance capitalists (see CHALLENGE, 4/16): the pro-China wing represented by Rousseff, and the pro-U.S. wing that orchestrated her ouster and installed her replacement, Michel Temer.
Regardless of the outcome of Rousseff’s trial in the country’s Senate, the workers of Brazil are sure to be the losers. Like arch-imperialist Hillary Clinton and gutter racist Donald Trump in the U.S., Rousseff and Temer are two sides of the ruling-class coin. Along with phony “socialists” like French President Francois Hollande or failed U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, these liberal reformers are all willing agents of the capitalist bosses. Until they are unmasked, our class will stay bound by the exploiters’ chains.
Brazil: Imperialist Prize
With a population of more than 200 million, Brazil is the largest nation and largest economy in Latin America. It lends critical military support to U.S. imperialism, with a lead role in providing troops for the United Nations MINUSTAH forces occupying Haiti since 2004.
A financial, industrial and agricultural powerhouse, Brazil ranks first in the world for exports of sugar cane, coffee and oranges, second for iron ore and soybeans, third for beef cattle.
The country’s enormous wealth is matched by enormous inequality, racist and sexist oppression, and the staggering poverty of Brazil’s working class—“well above the norm,” as the World Bank notes, “for a middle-income country.” Child labor and human trafficking remain rampant. In the rural North and Northeast regions, one of four children under age five suffers from chronic malnutrition (worldbank.org). In the urban favela shantytowns, where residents are predominantly Black or “mixed-race” (like 51 percent of the country’s population overall), murderous cocaine gangs operate with impunity and police kill children as a matter of routine (New York Times, 5/21/15).
As the U.S. bosses “pivot” to Asia to confront China in the South China Sea, China’s ruling capitalists are challenging the dominance of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, which dates to the mid-19th century. In Brazil, the biggest prize is offshore oil. In 2014, Brazil pumped 2.95 million barrels of petroleum per day, nearly as much as Iraq, Iran or the United Arab Emirates (U.S. Energy Information Administration). Billions of barrels in potential reserves lay off the Brazilian coast, ready to be tapped by the state-run oil operation, Petrobras, the largest company in Latin America.
In 2009, in exchange for oil import rights, China invested $10 billion in Petrobras. By 2012, Brazil’s annual trade with China had swelled to $75 billion, as compared to $6.7 billion nine years earlier (BBC, 3/27/13). Along with inroads by the Chinese bosses with other fake-leftist regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia, the rise of their influence in Brazil forced U.S. imperialism into action. (Another unreliable Latin American regime, in Honduras, was eliminated in 2009 in a military coup defended by Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State.)
Lies of the Workers’ Party
The Workers’ Party came to power in Brazil in 2002 under populist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula was adept at bribing workers with crumbs from Brazil’s oil wealth to fund the Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program that gave poor families an average of $54 (U.S.) per month and temporarily lifted millions out of extreme poverty. Meanwhile, a faction of Brazilian bosses used the Workers’ Party to pacify the country’s militant trade union movement and win allegiance from Black and indigenous workers. They coopted the anti-racist slogan, “Outro mundo e possivel”: “Another world is possible.”
In 2010, these bosses found a seemingly perfect misleader to succeed Lula as president: Dilma Rousseff. A former guerrilla fighter, she represented the many thousands of workers and students who were abused, tortured and executed after a U.S.-backed, anti-communist coup in 1964 ushered in an openly fascist military regime that ruled Brazil for two decades.
Behind the scenes, however, the real winner in Rousseff’s election was the Chinese ruling class, by then Brazil’s top trading partner. In 2013, capitalizing on the instability that followed the financial crisis of 2008, China agreed to swap billions of dollars of its currency as a reserve against future crises–a direct challenge to the U.S. dollar (BBC). Alarmed by this development, U.S.-connected finance capitalists in São Paulo struck back in the 2014 Brazilian presidential elections. Wealthy ruling-class families threw their support behind Marina Silva, the Socialist Party candidate. As Maria Alice Setubal, heiress to the Itaú Unibanco banking fortune, the largest financial conglomerate in the Southern hemisphere, explained, “The market is against Dilma” (Bloomberg, 9/14/14).
Return of the Right
While Rousseff narrowly won re-election, the Workers’ Party was growing hated by many workers. Prior to the 2014 World Cup, working-class neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro suffered wholesale evictions and occupation by Brazil’s military police. Workers and students responded with violent mass rebellions, strikes and demonstrations in more than 100 cities (The Guardian, 6/12/14). Unrest intensified in 2015, when global oil prices collapsed and Brazilian health care and education were slashed in the name of “austerity.”
With the sell-out Rousseff administration on the ropes, China’s investments and loans became crucial lifelines for the contracting Brazilian economy. In May 2015, three Chinese banks invested $10 billion in Petrobras. In February 2016, Petrobras received yet another $10 billion from the China Development Bank (Bloomberg). The pro-U.S. wing of Brazilian finance capital began grumbling in public. Two months later, Rousseff was impeached.
Rousseff chaired the Petrobras board when scores of executives and politicians—including her mentor, Lula da Silva, and several of her most vehement accusers—were apparently using the company as their personal piggy bank. Even so, the massive bribery and kickback scandal at Petrobras, known as Operation Car Wash, has yet to implicate her. The impeachment campaign is based on minor budgetary irregularities.
Still, few observers in Sao Paulo expect Rousseff to win back her office in the Senate trial. The fix is in; the pro-U.S. bosses, many of them active backers of the old military fascist regime, are back in charge. Acting President Michel Temer was an embassy informant for U.S. intelligence (Counterpunch, 5/26/16). He has named an all-white, all-male cabinet. The new finance minister, Henrique Meirelles, once headed BankBoston, a subsidiary of the Rockefeller-controlled Bank of America, which is in turn closely interlocked with the Setúbal-controlled Itaú Unibanco. Another top financial advisor, Paolo Leme, chairs the Brazil division of Goldman Sachs, the source of Hillary Clinton’s six-figure lecture fees.
Yet another Temer ally is Brazil’s richest man, Jorge Paul Lemann, who owns Heinz Ketchup and Burger King and is close to Warren Buffett, a leading figure in the main wing of U.S. finance capital. Lemann’s apparatus organized street protest groups to rally for Rousseff’s impeachment (Counterpunch, 5/4/16).
Last year, Brazil’s economy shrank by 3.7 percent. Evictions and attacks on workers have continued as the bosses there prepare for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The new reform on the table is “pension reform”—a frontal attack on retired workers.
Brazil’s History of Fightback
From the 1500s, the workers and resources of Brazil have been crucial to the rise of capitalism and imperialism. The colonizing Portuguese bosses named the land “Brazil” after their original source of New World profits: exports of brazilwood to Europe. With the genocidal enslavement of Africans, the local rulers amassed wealth from sugar, coffee, mining, and—after gaining independence from Portugal in 1822—industry. All along, slaves, peasants and workers faced down Brazilian capitalism’s barbaric “progress” with mass rebellions and insurrections. Fightback is a proud tradition in Brazil.
Progressive Labor Party fights to earn the leadership of the masses of Brazil’s industrial, agricultural and service workers. We fight to be the successors of the rebelling soldiers, industrial workers, and landless Black and indigenous farmers who built the fledgling Communist Party of Brazil into a fighting mass movement. In the 1930s, Communist-led women and men workers waged revolutionary armed struggle against the pro-Nazi Brazilian bosses, a history whose music has survived the intervening decades of brutal repression. While the old communist movement was defeated, the masses have never stopped fighting capitalism and imperialism.
Make History: Fight for Communism
Today, PLP stands with and supports the hundreds of thousands of workers and students battling police in the streets of Brazil’s cities against the openly racist, anti-working class government of Temer. But embracing Rousseff leads only into the arms of the Chinese imperialists. Like reformist parties everywhere, the Workers’ Party long ago sold out the working class.
Another world is possible—communism, where the working class runs society, not the capitalists. We call on workers to leave the dead-end road of elections and take the other path instead—to communist revolution. We call on workers all over to smash all borders and unite with their international class sisters and brothers. Help lead us and build a mass, fighting Party to defeat capitalism. The struggle continues, fight for communism! A luta continua, luta pelo comunismo!
When Muhammad Ali, arguably the greatest boxer of all time, died on June 3, he was praised as a great “American hero” by the bosses’ media, including many who’d once cheered on the U.S. government as it tried to destroy him. Ali’s great historical moment came in 1966, when he stood up against genocide, inspired the anti-Vietnam War movement, and refused induction into the U.S. military with the immortal words: “I ain’t got nothing against no Viet Cong [the communist guerrillas in South Vietnam). No Viet Cong never called me n-----.”
Later on, after the bosses stripped him of his heavyweight title and for three years blocked him from pursuing his livelihood, Ali clarified his position at a fair housing rally in his hometown of Louisville. Showing a keen grasp of the connection between racism inside the U.S. and U.S. imperialism in Asia, he said:
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here.
Substitute “capitalist rulers” for “white slave masters,” and Ali was right on target.
Unfortunately, Ali had already taken a wrong turn by joining the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black separatist, pro-capitalist Muslim organization. In 1963, after his friend Malcolm X left the organization, he stayed with the NOI and its ruthless gangster leader, Elijah Muhammad. Two years later, NOI members killed Malcolm X. To his credit, Ali later acknowledged his mistake: “Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes that I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things. But he was killed before I got the chance. He was a visionary ahead of us all.”
Ali’s Limits
When Ali was part of the worldwide mass movement against U. S. imperialism in Vietnam, he was unbeatable. He gained tremendous strength from the mass heroism displayed by hundreds of millions of workers and youth and, in turn, inspired those millions to deeper resistance. But when the mass movement collapsed, Ali’s celebrity and wealth isolated him from the working class. He drifted into a capitalist outlook.
In his later years, as Ali stopped fighting the rulers and became a defanged “humanitarian” reformer, the capitalist class showered him with endorsements. Wheaties, Pizza Hut, Louis Vuitton, Porsche, Adidas, Under Armour, and Toyota all came on board. Ali made up to $7 million a year and left an estate worth between $60 and $80 million.
He kept up his part of the deal. In 1984, Ali endorsed the racist union-basher Ronald Reagan for president. In 2001, he accepted the Presidential Citizens Medal from Bill Clinton, the arch-racist who engineered the mass incarceration of young Black workers, the racist destruction of welfare, the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, and, according to United Nations statistics, the murder of more than 500,000 children in Iraq by imposing sanctions that blocked food and medicine.
In 2005, four years after President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and two years after invading Iraq, the war criminal awarded Ali with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, By then, Ali had been slowed by the Parkinson’s Disease that ultimately killed him. It was a sad and telling moment when Clinton spoke at his funeral.
Paul Robeson, Unconquerable Communist
Ali’s political rise and fall recalls an earlier world-famous Black celebrity who was also vilified by the capitalist ruling class but stayed true to his anti-imperialist principles to the end: actor and singer Paul Robeson. In the 1930s, Robeson was a proud part of the international communist movement. He supported the advances made by the Soviet Union, at the time a revolutionary working-class state. He was an uncompromising fighter against racism and imperialism, and a lifetime member of the Communist Party-USA.
Called to testify before the anti-communist House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Robeson refused to name names and was blacklisted from working in the United States. To prevent him from performing abroad, the U. S. government also took his passport. Like Ali, he lost the equivalent of millions of dollars in income for standing up for his beliefs.
The big difference is that Paul Robeson was hated by the capitalists to the end. Even today, when they may name a school or a park in his honor, the bosses refuse to tell the truth about what he stood for. Robeson was a militant communist and anti-racist to the day he died. In 1973, sick and in seclusion, he said: “Though I have not been active for several years, I want you to know that I am the same Paul, dedicated as ever to the worldwide cause of humanity for freedom, peace and brotherhood.”
Robeson had two significant advantages over Ali. First, he came of age during the heyday of the old communist movement, when the Soviet Union was a beacon for workers throughout the world. Second, Robeson was exposed to advanced political ideas and developed a class-conscious worldview that sustained him through hard times.
Here is perhaps the biggest lesson of these two courageous men: If you want to fight for a better world, you cannot do it alone. Lifelong working-class fighters must draw their strength from the masses. And as the last few decades of Ali’s life showed, you can’t fight racism and sexism by accommodating the ruling class.
Today, capitalism is alive and well, murdering workers by the millions worldwide in its racist, sexist, and imperialist drive for profit. But with the bosses’ every new attack on our class and every step toward bigger wars for profit, the international working class is forging new fighters. Communists in Progressive Labor Party need to organize millions of workers to follow the lead of the Ferguson rebels and smash “the whole damn system.” Ferguson showed what Robeson knew and Ali may never have fully understood: History is made not by a few isolated “heores,” but by multiracial masses of workers, united in anti-racist struggle.
We cannot reform the racist, sexist, warmongering, profit-seeking system of capitalism. Fight and organize the international working class for the only solution: communist revolution. Join PLP!
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Patient-Worker Solidarity HIV, Straight Outta Capitalism
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- 17 June 2016 216 hits
LOS ANGELES, June 14—HIV treatment has become a multi-billion dollar industry that includes medication options as simple as one pill a day with very few side effects. Treatment and cure is limited to what is profitable for the bosses, not what is necessary for working-class health. Due to the inherent nature of capitalism, the benefits of any medical advances are countries where these drugs can be purchased at a profit. The bulk of the world’s workers most afflicted have no access to these medications.
Today, there are drugs that can prevent HIV infections. Yet in the U.S., the world’s most vicious imperialist empire, mini-epidemics occur which disproportionately affect the Black and Latin communities. Because of capitalist problems — unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, drug use, mental illness and the sexist oppression against homosexual workers combined with the destructive force of racist mass incarceration of the Black and Latin communities — HIV/AIDS makes caring for those newly infected with HIV or already in care particularly more difficult.
This is why co-workers and a communist from an HIV clinic organized a patient-staff dinner and showed a movie “Straight Outta Compton” where we raised anti-racist politics.
Our organizing has been ongoing modestly at our clinic. Throughout nearly two years, our clinic raised money for the family of Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old Black man murdered by the LAPD the same time as Mike Brown in Ferguson. His mother visited our clinic and brought us sandwiches. Since then, conversations around racism, police murder, the elections and capitalism are commonplace. Two co-workers came to Progressive Labor Party’s recent May Day dinner.
Another co-worker who attended a pre-May Day cookout helped organize a recent patient- staff dinner and movie night. Twenty patients and four staff came. More had originally signed on to come but unfortunately it coincided with an award ceremony for our medical director. Nonetheless, it was a great first start for an ongoing series cementing patient-worker unity!
Build Multiracial Patient-Worker Unity
Research has shown that when patients are active in their social networks providing more positive interactions (no drug use, no oppression against homosexual people or HIV-related stigma), patients tend to solidify their HIV care. The empirical evidence has caught up to what communists have been building from the get-go: multiracial patient-worker solidarity.
Despite its reformist politics, we chose the movie “Straight Outta Compton” (see CHALLENGE 9/30/15), it’s pertinent to many of our patients who were raised, and still live in the same area, grew up on the music, and have been dealing with the same racist police terror. The communist in the clinic made a short introductory speech, drawing connections between the Ferguson rebellion and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion following the racist acquittal of the cops who brutally beat Rodney King, a Black taxi worker.
Many patients related what they were doing during the rebellions. All related to the plight in the movie of Eazy E who dies of HIV/AIDS (HIV is the immunodeficiency virus that can lead to the AIDS syndrome and interfere with the body’s ability to fight infections.) After a brief discussion we enjoyed each other’s company and everyone was thankful for the event. Patients were asked to write down activities we could do together. We all bonded a little bit more, beginning to break the divide of “staff” and “patient.”
Racist, Sexist Politics Breeds HIV
There should be a huge difference between those infected with HIV today and those who were infected decades ago. Prior to antiretroviral therapy, a cocktail of drugs used to prevent the growth of the virus, HIV infection meant death from some obscure infection or cancer as their immune system inevitably declined. Even with the first generation of antiretroviral drugs, saving lives came with multiple drug toxicities that caused organ damage and included taking up to 25 pills a day, which now have netted billions for the pharmaceutical bosses.
Cure the Working Class of Capitalism
At our clinic in South Los Angeles (between Watts and Compton counties) there are hundreds of mostly Black and Latin men, women, young and old, infected and newly infected individuals. Like many HIV clinics, in addition to clinicians, we have a medical staff of social workers, case workers, therapists and psychiatrists who address numerous social issues. Most can be handled on a case-by-case basis. However, this rarely leads to any long-term changes never has societal effects.
Social work helps save lives, but the blame for HIV/AIDS is always heaped on the individual. The focus of attacking HIV/AIDS should be geared towards attacking capitalism. Its constant exploitation and racist, sexist oppression leaves working-class bodies vulnerable to disease.
No matter how hard we work for our patients, as long as capitalism exists our individual efforts will always fall short. Best-case scenario for our patients: we retain a patient in care; they stay on HIV medications and thus improve their immune function so that they don’t die of AIDS.
However, we’re finding that while some don’t develop AIDS, as our patients live longer, they will not only be victimized by other preventable medical ailments — from heart disease to cancer — they tend to get these illnesses at younger ages. Less than 25 percent of those we know to be HIV positive remains in care, and even less controlled on HIV medications.
Ultimately the disease of capitalism wins out if we don’t organize to overthrow it. Our movie showing and dinner was a step towards building the kind of working-class relationships necessary to eradicate HIV/AIDS and capitalism. It’s one and the same fight!
Back in December I wrote an article on “Base-Building and Resilience” based on work at my job, a bottling company. Today I write as an unemployed worker who coordinated a walkout.
After months of late nights and exhausted days, my coworkers and I had had enough of the lousy working conditions. We had won back being provided with free water and got the company to make minor repairs to our workplace, but many were still frustrated. Since December, many workers had been fired or had quit after finding “better” jobs. A workforce of 19 had dwindled to 9; only 4 of whom had been on the job 5 months before. This low amount of workers caused the bosses to panic. They started to speed up productivity using threats and lies and kept people on the job 12 to 16 hours a day to get the trucks loaded.
As for myself, I had been injured on the job so was only supposed to do 6 hours of work; yet I was forced to stay longer working the forklift since the bosses had the forklift drivers doing the loading. Although many of us were written up, we struggled against these attacks. When the bosses insisted that they were looking into raises for us, “the hard workers who stuck it out,” we would all just laugh and say “yeah right.”
So one Wednesday the bosses had a meeting where more lies were fed to us, and instead of eating them up, one of my co-workers stood up and said, “Bet if we walked out we would get some raises.” The supervisor immediately called the meeting off and sent us back to work. I started asking everyone their opinion on the action, how they would react, if they would join, and what they would like our demands to be. This was over a span of 3 hours. To my surprise, everyone was in agreement on two demands, a raise and more manpower, whether it be temps or hurrying the hiring process.
Keep in mind, nobody working in the plant at this time was receiving CHALLENGE and none of these workers knew of my communist politics. Suddenly we were all called into the office and challenged. The supervisor told us to drop the talk of walking out and get back to work. We refused, voicing our criticism and demands. They told us to be realistic. We insisted that we were. We demanded the head of the whole plant be there within an hour to hear our demands or we would walk. So we waited. An hour passed, and we regrouped on the work floor discussing the demands and our allegiance to each other. Everybody was pumped and ready to get this done.
We noticed the branch manager in the office. So we marched in with our heads high and our ambitions even higher. Then it happened. Many who were chosen to speak to our demands froze. It turned into me and one other guy arguing back and forth with the bosses. They kept saying that they couldn’t do anything: it was too late in the day; the demands weren’t realistic; maybe it would be possible, but it would take time; months or years. I immediately changed the situation and said we were walking out. Four of us walked out of the office, but five held back. I turned around and said “let’s go” to the others, who had earlier said they were going to walk, but all I got back was “I don’t know.” I turned my back and left with the 3 workers who didn’t hesitate.
We got outside and waited for the others, but they didn’t come out. While we waited we talked about how happy we were to stand together and how strikes were truly the only way workers could get respect. I gave them CHALLENGE, and we all shook hands and left. An hour later, I received a phone call from a co-worker who had stayed in the plant, and he informed me that four more, including him, had walked out a little later. They had gotten scared, but realized that walking out with us was the right decision. I expressed my agreement and the importance of solidarity between workers.
The next morning I went to work. On my way in, I was intercepted by the head of HR who informed me that I had received two write-ups, that I was no longer needed, and that I had to leave. This was what I expected. I contacted a co-worker who had not arrived yet; he had come in a little later, and informed that no one else returned to work that day so he left. But on Friday everyone but me was back; so I was the only one fired. I did stick out, leading the fight for the water and repairs and initially the walk out, but that was a risk worth taking to demonstrate working-class power.
Though the walkout didn’t succeed in getting our demands completely met, a large group of temps were brought in to help with the long days being worked. This walkout was too spontaneous and poorly coordinated. Other departments within the plant weren’t consolidated and no plan was made on how to push it further. Another weakness was me being the only one in a position of leadership since now that I am gone, the bosses will work to erase any trace of my influence over the workers.
I plan on maintaining contact with those who walked out to the best of my abilities. For my next step, I’m not too sure. I was already in the process of moving into another industry. In the meantime, base-building and increasing the membership are my main goals, which never changes.
A small dim light has shown itself at a bottling plant in Texas. The dark night will not live forever. The working class is strong, we just need to be organized enough, mass enough, and ambitious enough to show it to them. Here’s to the international struggle for communist revolution! Till the next time my comrades.
NEW JERSEY, June 11—At the Veterans of Foreign Wars center in Irvington, New Jersey, my acting group and I performed the play, “A System of Profiling.” We portrayed the lives of the four men—Daniel Reyes, Leroy Grant, Rayshawn Brown and Keshon Lamonte—who were shot by kkkops on the New Jersey Turnpike in April 1998. The system unsurprisingly failed these Black and Latin men—within a year of finding the cops guilty, New Jersey prosecutors acquitted them of all charges. The play was meant to send the message that these men and countless others will never find justice under capitalism.
Kkkops Kill on Bosses’ Cue
The play demonstrates how, from the training of polices to the courts and the popular media, capitalism is built and maintained with racism. It doesn’t matter that these men were on their way to achieve basketball scholarships at a university in South Carolina. This system thrives on the total disregard of the lives of all working class people.
Sexism was also a theme of the play. In it, we depict how bosses permit the police to get away with abusing women. One of the kkkops abused his then girlfriend for many years. Yet, he was allowed to keep his job!
The play stresses that we must and will fight back against racism and sexism. It ends with the four youth becoming committed fighters against the racist system, by “any means necessary.” They raise their fists in unity with the women, their attorney and the kkkop’s former girlfriend. This racist and sexist system will not divide us.
Back Drop of Racist Murders
After the play, the moderator posed the question of how to end racism. The audience was specially asked whether racism could be abolished by voting for Hillary Clinton or by fighting for a system in which racism will no longer exist. The men and women veterans in the audience agreed that voting was essential. The writer of the play, however, stressed that voting only serves to maintain the interest of the capitalist class. She pointed out the devastation that Hillary’s husband wrecked on the working class by slashing welfare—an action that decimated the neighborhood in which she worked for a school nurse in Newark, New Jersey.
To further the point that voting means replacing one war mongering capitalist stooge with another, the writer mentioned how she supported Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s because she believed his anti-war platform, only to be disappointed with his decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Two men, however, chimed up that “war is necessary” for the capitalists.
The question was then asked if the men, women, and children in Iraq and Vietnam asked to be killed by the U.S. bosses. They answered that war was good for the economy. There ensued a discussion as to who rules the political economy, and who benefits from those decisions. There was disagreement, especially on the need of voting to resolve problems. Our play and discussion about racism won over in the end because our group was asked by the veterans to return in August.
In getting this play off the ground, we learned that theater is a collective process from writing critiques to casting to finding a venue to directing and rehearsing. We also learned that it is a great way to highlight the ways in which the capitalist system beats us down every day. More importantly, it is a great way to bring communist politics to the masses. We will continue to use theater to let the workers know that there is a better system out there—communism.
