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Haiti's Solidarity Soup: Celebrating Workers’ Power
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- 26 January 2017 500 hits
Département du Sud, Haiti—January 1 is an important date on the Haitian calendar; it not only marked the beginning of a new year, but also liberation from chattel slavery and the formation of the world’s first Black republic. Traditionally, workers in Haiti mark the day by eating pumpkin soup—soup joumou, a thick stew with meat and lots of vegetables—recalling that under slavery, they were prohibited from enjoying this soup (it was reserved only for the slave masters and other exploiters).
This year, however, because of the ravages of Hurricane Matthew last October, not only did over 1,000 Haitian workers die, but the pumpkin crop was virtually destroyed in the three southern departments affected. Thus pumpkins were rare, expensive, and unaffordable for most workers in the region.
So another tradition was born. In one provincial town, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) organized a collective “solidarity soup.” “Solidarity” because we know from our international history that the unity of our class is fundamental to our liberation and emancipation. The slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue gave humanity an example of unity in the 18th century by battling one of the greatest armies of imperialism to gain their liberty from slavery. In fact, before mobilizing armed fighters, solidarity of purpose was the cement that bound them in common struggle.
Fightback takes many forms. For our first “solidarity soup,” we solicited financial and other support from our base, both locally and internationally, bought pumpkins where available, and served soup to hundreds of workers and their children. Along with the soup, we used the opportunity to discuss why Haitian workers face the conditions they do: rampant poverty and disease, unclean water, 83 percent unemployment, occupation by a United Nations military force, death and destruction by “unnatural” disasters. Capitalism, a system of profit for the few and misery for the masses, is squarely to blame.
“Solidarity soup” was a successful event. The participants remarked that they were served with dignity and respect. We served the people both literally and figuratively, feeding their bodies and arming them with communist consciousness about the source of their problems and how to escape the hell of capitalism and imperialism with communist revolution.
For the working class, internal solidarity and solidarity with our communist party is key. Capitalism pushes individualism, which is the negation of solidarity. Yet, while the bosses compete with one another for markets and power, they are united as a class to defend their own interests. They unite to sow divisions inside the working class, using a three-pronged weapon of racism, sexism and nationalism. Our task is to defeat those ideas ideologically and in action, build our mutual confidence, and put the working class in the driver’s seat of humanity.
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Los Angeles March: Expose Capitalism’s Sexist Nature
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- 26 January 2017 399 hits
LOS ANGELES, January 21—The word went out to all working-class sisters and brothers that Donald Trump was here to stay. Workers are still in shock how a gutter racist is now holding the highest position as president. Progressive Labor Party has been optimistic for our class, as we’ve been engaged in anti-racist and anti-sexist class struggles.
We showed how capitalism must be shut down and how we need multiracial unity, not identity politics, to fight racism. We’ve seen how capitalism treats sexist like rapist Brock Turner who got an early release by only serving three months instead of the bogus six! Racist police murders that have had zero convictions and just recently the cops that murdered Ezell Ford walked. We’ve continued to see how capitalism protects racists like the KKK and other fascist groups. These are all prime examples of the sexist and racist oppression that working class sisters and brothers deal with under capitalism.
People of all races took the streets. The fact that masses were out there showed that workers are listening. Through our mass work in a church, we helped organize over 100 congregants from numerous churches around Los Angeles. It’s still unclear how big our contingent was since we were unable to converge our groups.
We were stuck for hours like sardines. Many people were mostly enjoying humorous signs, taking selfies or photos of signs and the multiple performance artists. Most of the chants were the same as usual, but a few stood out like, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.” The rest included, “Not my president.” We were unable to see speakers. The only speakers we heard were giving directions on how to detour to get to City Hall.
A fellow church member held a poster of “No Racism”, which had the names of women and men that lost their lives to police violence. The names show how women and men mostly of color are seen as disposable objects. It would have been nice to see more signs that pointed out racism or immigration.
A member of our contingent said, “We should have been marching while Obama was deporting 2.5 million people and while Hilary was supporting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.” Most members of our contingent, however, still think the problem is Trump, not the capitalist system. We have a lot of work to do.
Of all the signs we saw throughout the march, there was no doubt that capitalism was not on the side of the workers. We must be sharper and oppose the illusion that this is what democracy looks like. So we asked, “who benefits from sexism, racism and capitalism?” In order to defeat this system, women and men must struggle together to see one another as equals. Our answer is to unite against sexism and racism and dismantle capitalism and fight for communism.
The following is the text from a speech at a January West Wednesday rally in Baltimore, given by a member of Progressive Labor Party. Tyrone, 44, was murdered by Baltimore kkkops on July 18, 2013. The family and the West Coalition have been protesting every Wednesday since.
Tyrone West was an early casualty of World War III. Now, why do I say that?
Let’s take a human relationship, a loving relationship between two people. There are always difficulties that arise. And if you can put your finger on the main difficulty, and solve that, everything else kind of falls in line.
Now, in the world, there’s one conflict that is the main conflict at the moment, and it influences every other development in the world. The main conflict in the world today is the rivalry between the major world powers, to see who’s gonna be top dog. The U.S., China, Russia—the major powers all want the same three things. They want cheap labor. After all, Nike spends about two dollars and fifty cents a day for their workers in Indonesia to put the shoes together. They want cheap labor. They want markets to sell their stuff. And they want raw materials like oil and everything else.
And sooner or later, as the U.S. declines as a world power, and other powers rise—due to the law of uneven development—sooner or later another power is gonna challenge the U.S. You know how China, in the South China Sea, have taken over these coral reefs that were under water, dumped sand on them, and created seven islands. And on each island now they have a military-grade airport, anti-aircraft missiles. And they’re not messing around. The U.S. keeps sending warships through there, challenging their control of the South China Sea. Thirty percent of the maritime trade in the world goes through the South China Sea.
Obama is now sending the Third Fleet to Asia to join the Seventh Fleet, which means sixty percent of the U.S. military is gonna be in Asia for the first time, ‘cause the ruling class knows that’s the likely place where the major challenges are gonna come to the U.S. empire.
Now let me take us back to World War I. In the U.S. there were a lot of people opposed to that war. They said, just like the upcoming war, it was a war between gangsters who want to control the world for their own profit. And what did the U.S. ruling class do? They had the Ku Klux Klan knock on your door if you didn’t want to join the military and agree to conscription. They terrorized people.
In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of police, and hundreds of thousands of troops have been used time and again to break strikes, to put down prison rebellions, to put down uprisings like the one from Freddie Gray. And so we’ve seen again and again how organized violence has been used against us.
But on a day-to-day level, they have a need to try to intimidate the working class. And the leading section of the working class, the most bold, the strongest, is the Black working class in the U.S. And that’s why, in this country, if you’re Black, you’re five or six times more likely than a white person, to be unarmed and killed by a cop. Because the ruling class knows who the main leaders are gonna be in the upcoming struggles, and they want to put fear in the hearts of people, and try to stop that.
As they gear up for war, they’re gonna do that more and more. And that’s why I say that Tyrone was an early victim of World War III, and the preparations for that war, and that direction that the world is moving.
Now we can do something about this! When that period arises, and we see a major conflict developing, we have to take the nuclear trigger out of the hands of the ruling class, and minimize the casualties to humanity. That’s our responsibility. It’s not an easy task, but that’s our responsibility.
And in order to do that, we’re gonna need a much larger communist movement. We need more people to seriously read Challenge, to join the Progressive Labor Party and think about dedicating their lives to destroying this system, and building a sisterly, brotherly world where there will be no more people treated like Tyrone West!
And in the new Challenge there’s an article on West Wednesday on page three. I’d like to encourage everybody to read that. And in the long run, we have to win this struggle, but even more important, we have to prepare to win bigger and bigger struggles in the future!
#communists dump on capitalism at #WomensMarchOnWashington, protesters join in.#notjusttrump pic.twitter.com/39NzUniuzL
— PLP Challenge (@PLPchallenge) January 23, 2017
