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Spring Communist School: Youth Take Lead Building for Revolution
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- 09 April 2015 31 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 30 — The 2015 communist school was like every PLP communist school in that it provided an opportunity to learn from and to teach each other. But this year was special because it may have been our youngest in terms of the ages of those who attended. The school was mostly comprised of elementary, junior, and high school students. We learned the most from these students that weekend.
After hearing a criticism from them about their group’s conversation being too simple, we struggled to improve it, to add to the content and analysis of the group. This goes to show that we should leave no one out of the revolutionary struggle and should not limit our organizing — we need the entire working class. Every worker and youth is able to understand communism. The school was an inspirational event for all (see letters on page 6).
The first night everyone naturally came together in the way only comrades do. And even when an issue arose regarding a certain bourgeois card game which some students were playing — and unsurprisingly had extremely terrible politics — the problem was highlighted, the criticism was made and the students switched to another game which was just as fun. Problem solving with communists is an efficient affair.
The next morning the collective came into action; the breakfast crew woke up before everyone else and made a delicious meal. After that, like clockwork, the cleanup crew tidied up. The communist school is an affirmation of the value of collective living, a small look into what the world we are fighting for might look like.
The first workshop discussed was the basics of capitalism, but in particular the mechanisms of surplus value as well as the ways that bosses divide workers against each other. The group transformed into an envelope factory. Four comrades transformed into envelope workers and the rest of us, save two bosses, were unemployed, watching the terrible game of capitalism unfold. The “bosses” stole the labor value of every worker, exploited all of them and paid back in wages only the smallest percentage of the actual value that was produced. Furthermore the bosses also paid Black and women workers less, refused to pay undocumented workers at all and fired anyone who was dissatisfied with their wage, replacing them with someone from the crowd of unemployed.
After the workshop, which discussed the likeness and difference of slavery and wage slavery, two high school students taught us about the crisis of overproduction. Some important things that arose were that in order for capitalists to survive they must both exploit workers as much as possible and sell as much as possible. The problem for the bosses is that they sell mainly to workers, who are the very ones they exploit and many can’t afford the very products they produce. This leads to a crisis of overproduction, leading to factory closings and mass layoffs.
A concept arising from the discussion that followed was of the redefinition of “necessity.” Capitalists are constantly wasting workers’ creative minds, creating new things for us to waste our money on. They change how society works around these things in order to make them seem like a necessity. For example, smart phones: they are ridiculously expensive but everyone has one and society has been so tightly wound around their existence that it’s difficult to function without one. Smartphones are made to be indispensable for workers, the bosses design them to break or become obsolete to impel people buy the next model. A larger example of the push to subordinate the working class to the needs of the capitalists: in the 1950s, the rulers built the suburbs and the interstate highway system to make cars an even greater necessity for workers.
After lunch, we went into the more hopeful and inspiring portion of the day: envisioning what communism will look like. We redefined the concepts of family, education, art, culture and the destruction of race and gender roles. We also envision what it would take to defend the revolution. We learned that education would involve everyone, both students and teachers, healthcare will be based on preventative measures and art and culture would be more communal and public. Ultimately the world would be a much more beautiful and collective place; every comrade would take care of each other.
Everyone at this school was reminded of why we’re fighting for communism, why we’ve dedicated our lives to the struggle against capitalism. The liberation of the working class, and the fight for a dictatorship of the proletariat is a fight for a better world, a world that prioritizes human life. This communist school reignited us with an understanding of what we have to overcome and imparted a vision for what the future could hold. We all have something to contribute to the fight against oppression and we all will add to the vision of communism. But it won’t happen unless we unite and fight, so join us and fight for communism!
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Pakistan: Communism the Only Solution to Sexism, Poverty, Terrorism
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- 09 April 2015 46 hits
PAKISTAN, April 7 — Capitalism’s crisis here grows worse each day, with workers increasingly unable to meet their basic needs of survival. The bosses here are breeding more terrorism, sectarianism, racism, sexism, and nationalism to keep the working class divided. Meanwhile working people are on the streets demonstrating against shortages of electricity and natural gas, unemployment, terrorism, increasing prices, privatization and closure of factories. Capitalism is a catastrophe for the working class. In the midst of this, the Progressive Labor Party has been organizing in several industries and working steadily to spread our ideas among the masses.
Pakistan is the sixth largest country in the world, with 180 million people. The bosses here control the world’s seventh largest military, with arsenals of modern tanks, planes and nuclear weapons. It has nuclear power, but there is no electricity from 12 to 22 hours a day, which is helping the bosses to make excuses about needing to lay off workers because of lost “productivity” during these outages.
Capitalism Forces Youth into Terrorism
The unemployment rate is about 10 percent according to government sources, but actually it is far more. High unemployment is pushing the poor people who see no alternative from crime and, in some cases, capitalist-financed terrorist groups. Most of the young boys who carry out the suicide attacks are from very poor families — many confess over the television to killing for 1,000 Pakistani rupees (10-12 USD) which goes to their families.
PLP is fighting hard to organize these workers and youth into CHALLENGE study groups and, eventually, a mass fighting movement and a mass working-class Red Army that will smash the real terrorists: the capitalist class!
The Violence of Poverty
Capitalist-backed terrorism is the tip of the iceberg of the daily violence workers face here. The 18.5 million farmworkers start their work early in the morning and finish at night for the “wage” of one piece of bread. They cannot even see calorie-rich foods that contain oil, sugar, or meat. Due to lack of medical facilities, the national infant mortality rate is about 76 deaths out of 1,000 live births. Those children who survive their first few years are vanishing because of malnutrition and environmental contamination. In the Sindh province, every day an average of 50 children die from these conditions.
Over 40,000 children are in forced labor because their families have no other option to obtain food. These kids work at workshops, brick kilns, hotels, loading docks and offices. For children who remain with their families, most do not have the natural gas needed to cook food because the available natural gas goes to the factories and into vehicles of rich people, driving up prices or creating a shortage.
Entrenched Sexism
In addition to the sexism of receiving lower wages with respect to male workers, women workers are routinely tortured, sexually harassed and abused, using the excuses of “religion” and “tradition.” According to a recent research article, 90 percent of women are psychologically abused, 50 percent are physically abused, and 15 percent sexually abused.
In Pakistan, a woman can be legally killed if she desires to marry someone without the consent of her family, and the killers will be protected by the same “justice” system that allows infants to die and sends the children who survive starvation into slavery. Pakistan is proof that capitalism can never provide a decent life for women, children or men.
PLP combats sexism. We fight for women workers to be leaders of mass movements and the Party. Only communism — a system without sexist wage differences and unpaid labor in the home — can provide a worthy life for women workers.
Slavery Without Wages
Out of a total population of 180 million people, only two million industrial workers are employed with a set work schedule, and are eligible for health insurance, social security, old age benefits, educational benefits, and the right to belong to a trade union. Seventy percent of workers work on an informal basis with bizarre schedules, are entirely at the disposal of their employers, and can be fired at any time without notice. If workers become sick or injured and cannot work, they do not receive wages and essentially face a death sentence.
Coal miners, transportation and construction workers as well as domestic and daily-wage workers are especially treated the worst, and not even considered as human beings by the bosses. Coal miners work without safety equipment and use outdated technology with unsafe methods designed to maximize coal production. When a miner is injured or killed, no investigation is launched, and company bosses try to keep it secret. In the southwestern Baluchistan province, Pakistan’s largest, the coal miners are targets for local capitalist-backed terrorist groups, and hundreds have been killed with not a single arrest made by the local or federal police. These terrorist groups kill workers to disrupt coal production and hurt the profits of the rival capitalists that own the coal mines.
Women Workers Must Lead
While working-class women can be legally killed for not consenting to marry, domestic workers are essentially chattel slaves expected to fulfill the sexual desires of their bosses. Every day boss-owned newspapers carry the stories of barbaric acts of torture and sexual assault against domestic workers. Yet workers will not find a single news article in the capitalist press about any punishment of these culprits, because under capitalism, the rich may do whatever they want to do with their “servants.”
This entire system is built around the exploitation of the working class, and none of these working-class women, or any of the millions of workers in Pakistan, will ever find justice under capitalism. PLP is making CHALLENGE the source of news for workers here, and the harder the bosses exploit us, the more of their own grave-diggers they make. Our steady growth is a sign that workers will not tolerate this forever, and our struggle to build a mass Party continues.
After weeks of vocal protest, Indiana Governor Mike Pence has begun to walk back his bigoted “religious freedom” law, which sanctioned refusal of service to customers based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.
Sexist Attacks
Members of the homosexual and transgender population are frequently targeted in sexist campaigns for violating gender norms. Forced to the margins of society, these people make easy targets to enforce the sexist order. Their persecution in Indiana will reinforce the persecution of women while dividing a potentially united working class.
Women are always targeted by the sexist anti-abortion movement. On March 30, under a 2014 amendment to the state criminal code, a judge in Indiana sentenced Indian immigrant Purvi Patel to 20 years in prison for having a miscarriage and abandoning her stillborn fetus (NYT, 4/1). This year to date, 235 bills have been proposed around the country to limit abortion rights. Many seek to criminalize pregnant women as well as doctors and clinics that provide for women’s health (RHRealityCheck, 3/31).
The attack on women is often intertwined with racism. In an atmosphere of surging anti-immigrant racism, Indiana has chosen Purvi Patel and Chinese immigrant Bei Bei Shuai to test the new law’s limits precisely because they are Asian immigrants. Once precedent is set with these prosecutions, the attack will be extended to all women.
New Southern Strategy
Governor Pence’s attack is an extension of the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy,” a 50-year-old campaign to appeal to the most reactionary elements in capitalist society. The strategy uses racist and sexist attacks on the working class to roll back the social safety net while escalating police violence in poor neighborhoods.
Capitalism needs scapegoats for the misery caused by their system. This is the ultimate goal of the Southern Strategy: white workers fighting Black workers, men fighting women, native-born workers fighting immigrants, straight people fighting gay people.
In 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater summed up the strategy:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n-----, n-----, n-----.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n-----’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct … is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites” (New York Times, 9/25/07).
Democrats quickly joined the game. In 1976, president Jimmy Carter vowed to protect “ethnic purity” in the U.S. and to oppose any mandate to integrate federal housing, a stand that helped him win the presidency. In 1992, Bill Clinton took time off from his campaign to fly back to Arkansas and personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally handicapped Black man. The gambit helped to swing a large portion of the white vote and enabled Clinton to “end welfare as we know it” as president. In 2009, Barack Obama, feeding the myth of a “culture of poverty,” castigated Black working-class youth for “aspiring to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne” rather than scientists or engineers (Reuters, 7/16/09).
The U.S. bosses’ effort to roll back the gains of the civil rights and labor movements has taken different forms over the last forty years. Black and Latin workers are gunned down in the streets by racist police — 111 people were murdered by police in March alone — or railroaded into a vast system of concentration camps. The U.S. prison and jail system, with more than two million inmates, holds the largest incarcerated population in the world.
During the economic crisis that began in 2008, 90 percent of U.S. workers have seen their income decline (EPI, 2/20/15). As banks were bailed out, workers lost their homes in record numbers. As the business community received record tax breaks and handouts, union membership has continued to decline. As salaries for top university administrators grow at a record pace, tuition hikes have created more than $1 trillion in student debt. Workers are rightfully angry, but it remains an open question as to who they will blame for their troubles.
Mike Pence may have overstepped with his religious freedom law, at least for now. Pence has deferred to his masters in the Indiana business community by demanding revisions to put a humanitarian face on the law. But workers should not be fooled. Only a united working class can hope to challenge the capitalist class. Only a communist analysis can give us the tools workers need for unity.
April 13 is “Katyn Memorial Day.” This is the day that Polish nationalists, and anticommunists everywhere, commemorate the alleged murder by the Soviet Union of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war in April to May 1940 in the Katyn forest.
And IT DID NOT HAPPEN!
This is an anticommunist lie. It was invented by the Nazis in 1943, and taken up by all the capitalist powers during the Cold War.
In 1990 to1992 two fanatic anticommunists, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, “admitted” Soviet guilt.
I believed it myself for a few years. Then for a longer time I believed that “We just can’t know — there’s too much conflicting evidence.”
But now we know that this story simply cannot possibly be true. Much of the evidence for this conclusion is only available in Russian. One English-language article was published in August 2013:
“The ‘Official’ Version of the Katyn Massacre Disproven? Discoveries at a German Mass Murder Site in Ukraine.”
http://sdonline.org/62/the-official-version-of-the-katyn-massacre-disproven/
No communists or pro-Soviet people made the discoveries that utterly disprove the “Katyn” story. Polish and Ukrainian archeologists did that. They found things they never expected to find, and certainly hoped no one would ever find.
And now they are keeping quiet about it. Yes, the Poles, the Ukrainians, and the Russians too, are keeping this secret. This, the biggest World War II-related discovery of the past several years, is simply hushed up, a real “conspiracy of silence.”
“Katyn Memorial Day”, April 13, is a good day to tell the world:
“Stalin and the Soviets Are Not Guilty of Killing The 22,000 Polish POWs! They are innocent!”
This isn’t going to stop the anticommunists. Of course not! Since when have anticommunists cared about the truth?
Capitalist Poland has spent at least $500 million on hundreds of memorials all over Poland, and three of them in Russia. They aren’t going to allow a little thing like historical truth spoil their wonderful anticommunist orgy!
So we should do our best to spoil it for them. Today is a good day to tell the world:
“The so-called ‘Katyn Massacre’ Is An Anticommunist Fraud!”
Spread the word!
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40th Anniversary of Boston ‘75 — PLP Smashed Anti-Busing Racists
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- 09 April 2015 35 hits
This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the Boston Summer Project, the first such project held by the Progressive Labor Party and its Party-led mass organization, the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR).
Forty years ago, Boston was one of the most segregated and racist cities in the country. The ruling class of Boston profited greatly from dividing workers along racial lines and many white workers bought into the racist ideas pushed by the politicians. It was dangerous for Black workers to enter all-white neighborhoods like Charlestown and South Boston. Black families who moved into white neighborhoods were attacked. Schools in Black neighborhoods were woefully underfunded and overcrowded; schools in working-class white neighborhoods were not much better. Racist covenants by white homeowners banned sale of homes to Black families.
For years, Black parents and community organizations had fought for better schooling for their children. It was found that the city of Boston had engaged in a deliberate, systematic pattern of segregation of its public schools. Therefore, in 1974, Boston was ordered by a federal judge to desegregate its schools by busing Black children to schools in white neighborhoods and vice versa. Immediately, racist city council members Louise Day Hicks and Albert O’Neil organized a group called ROAR-Restore Our Alienated Rights, (which was more accurately nicknamed Racists on a Rampage) to protest the busing order. During the 1974—75 school year, ROAR organized mob violence against Black children bused into South Boston.
PLP decided to organize a project in the summer of 1975 to combat this blatantly racist violence. It began with our May Day march in Boston where we were physically attacked by a group of racists and soundly defeated them. Then the Party and InCAR sent more than 125 people from all over the U.S., mostly students, to Boston for the summer. Our activities varied. Some organized an anti-racist summer school for Black children who had lost considerable schooling due to a year of racist attacks. Others enrolled in courses in community colleges to spread ideas of multiracial unity. We held daily rallies against ROAR’s racist ideas and collected thousands of signatures on a petition calling for multiracial unity, an end to mob violence and quality, integrated education for all. We went on the offensive against the local racists by fighting them physically again and again. There was a constant tension that permeated the city. By the summer’s end, we so weakened the power of the racist anti-busing movement that ROAR was defeated.
Then in September 1975, PLP and InCAR members rallied to greet Black children on the first day of school. The cops pushed us into a crowd of racists throwing stone at the kids. PL’ers turned their bullhorn on the racists with a message of multiracial unity.
For many, Boston ’75 was a defining moment in our lives. For some it marked an increased commitment to fight for a communist revolution. Even for others who are no longer members of Progressive Labor Party, it was a time of political commitment and activism that we can look back on with pride.
Today, capitalists are still building racist terror to prevent workers from uniting. We invite all antiracists to join us in celebrating May Day 2015. It is especially important now to learn about that movement since the ruling class rewrote history, and expunged the blatant racism of the anti-busing movement from the record.