WASHINGTON, DC, October 10 —Tens of thousands of antiracists gathered at the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March. As the Nation of Islam (NOI) misleaders pushed for dead-end nationalism and reform, a small but aggressive group of Progressive Labor Party members and friends rallied for a communist solution to racist oppression.
NOI’s strategy is Black capitalism, separatism, sexist oppression, pie-in-the-sky religion, and a blame-the-victims sales pitch. PLP’s strategy is to build a multiracial, working-class movement to smash capitalism and create an egalitarian society without bosses, money or profits.
Shut It Down
Louis Farrakhan, NOI’s worker-bashing excuse for a leader, spoke for more than 145 minutes. He attacked women workers for having abortions and poor cooking skills; he attacked Black men for failing their families. Yet he gave the capitalist exploiters and warmaking imperialists a free pass. With a big enough crowd to seize the White House and spark rebellion, the 82-year-old Farrakhan—the snake who has admitted inciting the assassination of his former mentor, Malcolm X—could make only an empty call for “justice” through reform and god.
Fortunately, triumph is defined by more than numbers. Winning lies in the class content of the politics, which PLP had in abundance. We countered the NOI’s pacification strategy with our militant chanting: “This racist system — shut it down!” Surrounded by the masses, our multiracial group of women and men launched a rally within the rally. Most people were receptive to our politics, as evidenced by the 1,700 CHALLENGEs and leaflets we circulated over two hours.
The crowd’s response to our literature reflects the conclusion being drawn by workers across the world: The whole rotten system needs to go. Progressive Labor Party says YES, capitalism must go. It cannot be reformed. Our brothers and sisters in Ferguson and Baltimore are helping to clue us in on the solution. We must turn these sparks of rebellion into a communist revolution—and a system free of racism, sexism, exploitation and imperialist war, run by and for workers and youth. Communism is the only system based on the needs of the international working class.
Rebellion, Not Atonement
At the original Million Man March (MMM) in 1995, NOI declared a personal Day of Atonement for Black men—an exercise in racist victim-bashing. The organization’s leadership demanded that Black male workers apologize for living through slavery, racism and capitalism. In the wake of the mighty rebellions of Ferguson and Baltimore, NOI began today’s MMM with a prayer. It culminated with a pathetic plea for “the government to respond to our suffering.”
The working class in Ferguson and Baltimore knows how the government responds to workers’ suffering: with tear gas, kkkops and military-grade weapons. Under capitalism, the capitalist bosses hold state power. They control the politicians, the judges and the cops. The system is rigged against the working class.
State power in the U.S. has always rested on racist murders. The thirteen colonies were built on the genocide of indigenous peoples. The U.S. economy boomed with the vicious enslavement of Black women, men, and children. The gross inequalities that define the U.S. today are the fruit of Jim Crow, the legalized system of racist segregation imposed after the Civil War. No amount of reform can change this system’s racist core.
Women Leaders
Women have stood at the front lines of the battles against police terror (see letter). This was and remains the case after the murders-by-cop of Tyrone West, Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston, Ramarley Graham and countless more. At the first Million Man March, women were told to stay home. Today the NOI boxed them into supportive, subordinate roles. PLP rejects this sexist sidelining and degradation of women workers. Liberation for working-class men is linked to the liberation of women workers—of all workers. The fight against capitalism is one and the same for every member of our class. The latest wave of rebellion has taught us that multiracial unity of women and men is indispensable and non-negotiable.
Same Enemy, Same Fight
Following the action at the march, PL’ers and friends collectively evaluated the day’s events at a nearby restaurant. At first our discussion analyzed the politics of the event, how our group fared in reaching out and spreading communist ideas, and how workers responded. The discussion evolved as differing perspectives were aired by students and friends.
We debated a range of topics: the role of communists in leading struggle, the role of Black workers as the vanguard of revolution, our general strategy for fighting racism. At the end, disagreement boiled down to one question: Can the fight against racism be separated from the fight against capitalism?
Some friends thought, “Black people have to figure themselves out first before we can unite as a multiracial group to fight capitalism.” But as one comrade pointed out, “That’s like saying we all agree that we want to head to the same destination. To get there, we have to go west--but first, we are going to go east.” Fighting racism is part and parcel of battling capitalism. The two are inseparable. Even as masses of antiracists are saturated by Black nationalist ideas, PLP has been fighting back with multiracial unity — whether at an anti-KKK rally, a school integration struggle, or a campus campaign against U.S. imperialism.
Our presence at the march sharpened the politics of the event, however modestly. More important, it sharpened the political understanding of young comrades within our Party. Our post-march discussion was a model for how we will make decisions and run society under communism, when workers hold state power. The discussion will continue at an upcoming study group.
Capitalist stooges and fake leftists like Farrakhan are followed by masses of workers, however reluctantly. These workers are seeking a real movement that will fight back against capitalist oppression. Farrakhan and his ilk may have the numbers, for now. But it’s becoming obvious to more and more workers that they have no solution.
You Gotta Be in It to Win It
PLP has the only solution: communist revolution. We know that millions of workers can be won to these ideas. Hundreds of millions of workers have fought to the death for them in the past. We are building our international working-class revolutionary movement until it has the numbers to take this fight all the way. Unlike NOI, our Party is no secret society. It is open to all workers—and it’s our job to get out there and tell them about it!
But while our Party has 50 years of militant history, we have a long way to go and much to learn about organizing a mass workers’ movement. We have a world to learn—and a world to win.
*****
Black Nationalism Fails Black Workers
Alongside racism and sexism, nationalism is the rulers’ main tool to divide and exploit the working class. It traps us into false unity with groups of bosses, based on nationality or the anti-scientific myth of “race.”
Black politicians are like any others; they serve the capitalist rulers. No matter who wins the next U.S. presidential election, racist cops will keep terrorizing Black, Latin, and immigrant workers and youth. The capitalist court system will keep jailing them by the millions. Women will keep suffering sexist violence; immigrant workers will keep dying in pursuit of a better life. Baltimore had a Black mayor and a Black police chief, but Freddie Gray is no less dead today.
There is only one race: the human race. There are only two sides: capitalists and workers. They will always be in conflict—until we smash the bosses once and for all.
We don’t need the capitalists or their fake version of democracy. Progressive Labor Party fights for communist revolution and working-class power. We say: Don’t vote, distribute CHALLENGE! Don’t vote, fight the racist Klan in blue and the racist Klan in white! Don’t vote, fight back against imperialist war! Don’t vote, revolt and fight for communism!
Join us!
I am an antiracist member of PLP and was honored to be asked to join a contingent of New York families who have lost loved ones to racist police murder for the trip to Washington, DC, for the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March (MMM) called by misleader Louis Farrakhan. We arrived at a gathering Friday night. It was supposed to be a chance for the families to get together and share their stories. Every grieving face you’ve seen on TV for the last twenty years was in that room, determined to honor their loved ones and do whatever they can to achieve justice.
Imagine my surprise when twenty minutes in, I was taking part in a walkout orchestrated by the New York families. The ruling-class media and certain organizations have created tension between some families. They are determined to make celebrities out of the latest victims of police murder, divvying up airtime, talk time, and face time based on how much attention the murder of your loved one received. The murders of our families are not a popularity contest! Every single one is an equal attack on our class and demands organized outrage.
So after traveling from all over New York with the faulty promise of being able to share their stories, these women leaders —mothers, sisters, and aunts—refused to stand for the lousy one minute they were allotted to quickly say their name and the name of their murdered loved ones. We left! They trashed the attempt to turn the murder of their loved ones into a token recognition. The organizers of this MMM show think the blood of our families is a game!
What the cops and bosses don’t realize is that they end up fueling a family of anti-racist fighters, bonded together through tragic circumstances. We can learn a lot from these women who refuse to give up hope and continue to fight. They are refusing to let this system off the hook.
On the day of the march, we dressed in red with the pictures of the slain on our chest. We went through metal detectors to get the wristbands that would lead us in front the monument. If your wristband had a star on it, you were guaranteed a seat, but it would also mean you were separated from your other family members and supporters who traveled with you.
The divisive tactics and competition didn’t end there. It was a constant struggle to make it to the stage. There were not enough seats. As if that was not insulting enough, of the ten families who were told they would be allowed to speak, only two actually got the chance. Family members separated by the stage struggled to get back together afterwards.
How disgusting! These families deserve more than to be paraded out when it suits the politicians and capitalist stooges. They need the solidarity that only the working class can provide. This system must not get off the hook for the murders of our class sisters and brothers. It is a very promising development that Progressive Labor Party is now positioned to make these points from inside the movement.
Students and teachers in Kenya are squarely facing the crises of global capitalism and U.S. imperialism. In September, at the same time as the teachers’ strike in Seattle, public educators across Kenya waged a five-week strike against the national Teachers Service Commission (TSC). The strike was launched by the two national teachers’ unions in response to the government’s failure to follow through on promised pay increases of 50 to 60 percent, as ordered by Kenya’s Supreme Court. According to the Nairobi-based Daily Nation, schools were “paralyzed” in most of the country as striking teachers “stormed” schools where teachers had scabbed (9/8/15). University students supported the strike, and the striking public school teachers built solidarity with non-unionized private school teachers.
Kenya’s capitalist bosses are simultaneously flirting with two imperialist powers, the U.S. and rising China, with workers and students caught in between. Weeks before the teachers’ strikes, in an attempt to ward off Kenya’s growing alliance with Chinese imperialism, President Barack Obama signed $1 billion in trade, oil pipeline and technology deals in Nairobi. As the New York Times noted (7/24/15), trade with China has blossomed to $222 billion, three times the country’s business with the U.S. Meanwhile, China and Kenya are jointly funding a new East Africa railway network to connect Kenya with Chinese interests in South Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere.
As the Daily Nation noted, however: “Billions of shillings in terms of teachers’ salaries, students’ school fees, et cetera... were put on hold...You cannot build a new railway line worth more than Sh300 billion [Kenyan shillings, equivalent to about $3 billion U.S.] and fail to raise a comparatively paltry Sh16 billion to pay teachers” (10/11/15).
Teachers in both the U.S. and Kenya have a world to win if they can succeed in uniting their common struggle against capitalism with workers throughout the world. The education struggle knows no borders, and neither does the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party! As we fight for education for our youth, our task ahead is to sharpen the militancy of our struggle here and keep connecting our struggle to our class sisters and brothers around the world. We fight for a communist world, where all workers can fulfill their maximum potential after money and borders are smashed.
CHALLENGE readers should share this article with other teachers and students, raise this struggle in their parent-teacher associations and unions, and join PLP to build a movement to fight back!
Last month’s Seattle teachers’ strike, the first in the city’s schools in 30 years, marked a qualitative advance in efforts to build militant anti-racism in a 5,000-member union. Years of struggle by the Social Equality Educators (SEE) caucus paid off in making the five-day work stoppage more politically effective—and a foundation for building a fighting, anti-racist organization for years to come.
In Seattle as elsewhere, public schools have been under sustained attack. Billionaires are raiding what remains in the public coffers as the capitalist ruling class attempts to centralize control of education. In Washington state, the fiasco of school funding was laid bare by a state Supreme Court ruling that held the Legislature in contempt for failing to fully fund basic education. Educators reached their breaking point, and the strike was the result.
But as subsequent events made clear, reform politics in the current period is a game rigged by the capitalist bosses and their allies in union leadership. Despite a unanimous strike vote by the rank and file, the union’s executive board and representative assembly were authorized to suspend the strike on their own, with the general membership having no real say.
Nonetheless, we achieved some success. A 40-member bargaining team fought for guaranteed recess time, the requirement of “Race and Equity Teams” at each school, and the removal of test scores from teacher evaluations. These demands generated broad public support. We strengthened our position by defying union leadership and organizing 200 educators in our zone to march five miles to the district headquarters. The march pressured the union leadership and sent a message to the bargaining team to hold the line and stop submitting weak counter-proposals. This action built unprecedented solidarity in our ranks, and a tentative agreement was reached that night.
In the end, we won 30 minutes per day of guaranteed recess for all schools—a rebuff to administrators in low-income, majority Black and Latin neighborhoods, where recess had been cut to as little as 15 minutes in a fool’s errand to increase test scores. We won the establishment of Race and Equity Teams in 30 percent of schools, a wedge for teachers to expose racism and build anti-racist practices. While we’ll never get rid of racism in the schools under capitalism, we can use these teams to develop more people into anti-racist fighters. Finally, we won the fight to eliminate test scores from teacher evaluations, a major blow to the capitalists’ national education reform movement.
Capitalist Schools Bound to Fail
These concrete achievements are important. But we should be clear that the strike’s main victory was to- develop consciousness among educators as participants in class struggle, however unevenly. Of course, illusions persist. As many see it, the next step in this struggle is to force the hand of the State Legislature, possibly through statewide strikes, to reform the tax structure for education funding. This strategy fails to address the reality that capitalist education will never serve the needs of the working class. Even if the state “fully” funds education, by the bosses’ standards, we will still be stuck with the general crisis of global capitalism and the particular crisis of U.S. imperialism. We will still face attacks from a ruling class demanding that workers do more for less. Our students will still face a future of racist police terror, mass unemployment, and forced recruitment into the next global imperialist war.
But to the extent that we can continue to develop working-class consciousness and workers’ confidence in their collective power, we will have taken another step forward. Now we have to mount more mass struggles to demonstrate that capitalism is not a system that can be reformed. It must be replaced by communism, a system that will transform education to meet the needs of all students—and the anti-racist, anti-sexist society they will help to build.
CHICAGO, October 3 — “This is what a communist society will look like!” remarked one comrade after observing our international and multi-generational, working-class gathering. The occasion was our city collective’s second annual October Revolution Celebration Dinner, hosted at a banquet hall on Chicago’s south side. More than fifty comrades and friends, hailing from Oakland, Guyana, Mexico and the Philippines, came together.
After everyone had eaten their fill of international cuisine, the program kicked off with a fiery speech from a comrade who blasted the racist and sexist failures of capitalism and emphasized the need to organize for communist revolution. Next came an interactive, bilingual presentation that summarized the history of the first days of the Russian Revolution, and also highlighted past and present struggles of Progressive Labor Party’s first fifty years. Communist songs were sung, and the evening wrapped up with dancing.
Having a DJ made the event livelier, but a number of comrades were upset that some of the songs played contained openly sexist language. This underlined the importance of infusing culture with communist, egalitarian ideas and replacing abusive and degrading themes with powerful, pro-working-class messages. Cultural events are just some of the many steps needed to build the class struggle to the level achieved by the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries. They wielded working-class culture as a powerful weapon in the fight to violently overthrow the rotten capitalist class and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. We’re committed to making this event twice as big next year, and to win more workers to the Party and the fight for a communist world!
