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LETTER: Cadre school exposes capitalist propaganda machine
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- 23 July 2023 105 hits
The Baltimore/DC area recently held a discussion-based and art-filled cadre school on capitalism in education and the role of consumerism in promoting capitalist ideology. Over 45 people came to discuss the problems inherent in capitalism and the path towards communism.
I have attended more than a dozen cadre schools in my experience with Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and this one was one of the most engaging ones. We did art projects related to advertising which generated more casual base building discussions with the other participants. In the education component we made posters showing what we had discussed with a randomly selected partner; this helped me discuss ideas with my partner collaboratively. There was music playing during the breaks, and plenty of chances to meet other attendees and exchange ideas. The most exciting thing was the multiracial, comradely workers who attended. Everyone was encouraged to participate in the discussions and the atmosphere was comfortable enough that honest and sharp discussion flowed.
We also made a point that everyone had to wear masks since the event was indoors, and I’m glad we took Covid-19 seriously because it turns out one attendee tested positive for Covid-19 the next day! Thankfully no other cases were reported, probably because we all wore masks. The cadre school was led by relatively new comrades and while of course there were a few bumps here or there, overall, everyone had a positive experience. We are definitely looking forward to continuing this type of discussion-oriented format in the future.
We also learned that we need to continuously put forward organizing for the Party as the only way to fight capitalism and build a communist future.
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Organizing in the Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival for Revolution!
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- 23 July 2023 108 hits
PINEVILLE, KENTUCKY, May 27—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a cadre school and sponsored a booth at the Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival. We met a lot of people whose relatives were in bloody Harlan in the 1930s and told us some of their stories about armed battles between striking coal miners and mine owners and their goons.
We had a lot of good conversations. We engaged with about 70+ people. We gave out free water, tootsie rolls, flyers for the cadre school, and lots of CHALLENGE newspapers. We had a backpack full of PLP literature that we shared as well as a pamphlet we wrote about rebellions in Appalachia. We also learned not to get chocolate that melts.
There were far more good people than bad at the Festival, but we faced some reactionaries on the first day. We left our table for 10 minutes to put things away and they spilled something sticky like Sprite on our table and wrote "f@#x you commies". Still, we were able to answer all questions of some of the people who had reactionary ideas. Of course, if someone is just a bully there’s no good response!
They have this special potato chip only in Appalachia called grippos like spicy barbecue chips, they were really good! We also had many comrades from Chicago come too and at the end of the cadre school we sent them home with plenty of grippos.
The outdoor cadre school went well, but rain kept the attendance a little lower than we expected. We had talks on the opioid crisis and the history of addiction under capitalism. A comrade from Kentucky talked about how Appalachia seems like a colony since much of their economy revolves around a single commodity like coal or timber, and most Appalachian capitalist enterprises and land are owned by people outside of Appalachia.
Build the revolutionary communist movement everywhere!
Los Angeles, July 4-The sound of beating drums traveled for blocks through downtown Los Angeles. Mirrored music could be heard near the international airport and in Santa Monica as well. Hotel workers from the Unite Here union Local 11 wanted to make sure their work stoppage over the July 4th weekend was felt by the hotel bosses in LA. As they took action to fight for a living wage, members of Progressive Labor Party joined them on the picket lines to remind them that the workers of the world produce and run everything and deserve nothing less than the whole pie. This we know will only happen with a communist revolution.
For three straight days, workers picketed in front of over a dozen hotels from 3 AM through 11 PM. The action culminated in a large protest where hundreds of workers, 90 percent of whom are Black and Latin women, marched to demand hotel profits be shared with them since the hotels can’t function without them. Hotel bosses stand to make billions with the upcoming World Cup and Olympics being hosted in LA, but they want to maintain the current $18.86 an hour minimum wage. One would have to work 17 hours a day to afford a two-bedroom apartment in LA with that salary. These poverty wages have left hundreds of women unable to be with their families, without healthcare, hungry, or worse. One woman can only afford to live hours outside of LA, so every week, she leaves her family to sleep four nights in her car outside of the hotel that she cleans.
While workers demand a living wage, hotel bosses responded that it's not their responsibility to keep up with the cost of living in LA. We know these thieves want to keep every penny of profit for themselves. Workers have the power to unite and fight for the reform of higher wages, but the only way to end exploitation is to rid the planet of capitalism.
Liberal politicians and union misleaders only appear to care
The liberal bosses and union leadership in LA sound like they are on the side of the workers. Union leadership is pushing for a minimum wage of $25 an hour. Council members Curren Price and Katy Yaroslavsky took it a step further by introducing a motion that would make the minimum wage for hospitality workers $30 an hour by 2028. Even these wages are at poverty levels for LA though. But the larger danger comes from when workers believe these liberals and misleaders are our friends. Capitalism is never run in the interest of workers. These union misleaders and local politicians are nothing but representatives of local capital. Their appearance of care for our class is to keep us settling for reforms instead of finding true change through revolution.
The biggest farce came when Los Angeles City Council members Hugo Soto-Martínez and Nithya Raman and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo were arrested at a rally on June 22, 2023 in support of hotel workers. This is nothing more than an attempt to launch their political careers, similar to how DiBlasio’s New York City mayoral campaign took off after being arrested while “supporting” hospital workers. We can’t be fooled by these opportunists. Two hundred workers were also arrested at that rally, but they and what they were fighting for was not the headline of any news story because workers are disposable in this rotten system.
Workers solidarity now - communism ASAP
Although it was hard to talk on the picket lines because of the successful drumming to which workers were exposed, members of the Party made some connections with workers. They were encouraged by our support as we marched side by side with them and chanted. While the union misleaders limited their chants to “si se puede” (“yes we can”) and “huelga”(“strike"), these workers are learning important lessons from the picket line about class consciousness, solidarity, and workers’ power. One of the picket leader’s comments revealed this understanding - “They are making all this money from the Olympics already and they don’t want to share it with us. But we do the work. When the LA teachers went on strike, we joined them, and we have seen a lot of teachers come and support us too. We just have to keep fighting together.” Workers in LA are learning valuable lessons on the picket lines that can’t be learned anywhere else. Many had children joining them, so they are gaining this understanding as well. Our job as revolutionaries is to build on that understanding to reveal that workers can and will run society in a communist world.
The workers went back on the picket line on July 10th after a short break. Additionally the Screen Actors Guild union joined the Writer’s Guild on strike this week. This uptick in class struggle in the LA area gives us lots of opportunity to raise ideas of class consciousness and turn them into schools for communism. We will definitely be back out there with them and struggle to bring our base along so they can learn these lessons as well. The fightback in LA continues!
If the far-right Vox party joins Spain’s ruling coalition after the July 23 general election, it will be the first Spanish government to include open fascists since the death of mass murderer Francisco Franco in 1975. It would also mark the latest failure of liberal democracy to manage the growing global crisis of capitalism. As the U.S. bosses keep weakening in the face of an aggressive challenge by the Chinese imperialists, their junior NATO partners—the centrist parties that have ruled Western Europe since World War II--are losing their grip as well.
Instability is everywhere; everything seems up for grabs. With the war in Ukraine escalating and World War III looming, the old liberal democratic world order is in shambles. Confronted with runaway inflation, a wave of climate catastrophes, and mass unemployment (close to 13 percent in Spain), both the open fascist insurgents and the old guard liberals are scapegoating migrating workers—a hallmark of rising fascism. As millions of workers’ lives are upended in the general turmoil, a segment of the working class has been infected by the disease of anti-immigrant racism. In this dark night of weak class consciousness, the capitalist rulers are pulling out all the stops to mislead, deceive, and divide us. Regardless of which of the bosses’ factions wins the next round of elections, the rulers will ultimately need full-blown fascism to have any chance to destroy their competition and protect their profits.
Only an international mass workers’ movement, led by communists, can beat back the rising tide of fascism. Only communist revolution, spearheaded by the fighting Progressive Labor Party, can end imperialist war and create a society run by and for the working class. The profit system can’t reform its way out of this crisis. History shows us that it can never serve workers’ needs. Capitalism must be destroyed, root and branch. Join us—we have a world to win!
As liberal democracy weakens, open fascists rise
Six years ago in Spain, nostalgic for the Franco years (foreignpolicy.com, 6/29), a splinter group denounced the right-wing Popular Party as too soft and set off on its own. Widely dismissed and underestimated, the Vox party exploited workers’ anxiety over the Catalan separatist movement, which was pushing to break away from the richest region of Spain (centered in Barcelona) and form its own country. Using the classic fascist tools of gutter racism and sexism, and taking a nationalist page from the U.S. Small Fascist forces fronted by Donald Trump (“Make Spain Great Again!”) Vox “opposes abortion rights, denies climate change and rejects the need for the government to combat gender violence” (New Indian Express, 7/18).
Now backed by 15 percent of voters nationwide, Vox is being courted to form a new parliamentary majority by the Popular Party, which is favored to win the upcoming election after shifting to a more openly racist, anti-immigrant platform (El Pais, 7/24/2018). If that alliance comes to pass, Spain would join a growing list of European countries--including the old World War II fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Vichy France--with openly fascist parties either within the government or as a leading opposition to the government. And with Spain next in line to hold the presidency of the European Union, Spanish fascists could influence the EU’s agenda.
When liberal democracy fails the capitalist class, fascism gives the bosses more direct control over all aspects of society, from the media and universities to industrial policy and war preparations. It’s no accident that fascism is the fastest-growing political movement in Europe today. This reality would have been unthinkable in the decades following World War II, when fascist parties were outlawed In Germany and marginalized in France and Italy. But times are changing, and fast. Millions of workers have lost confidence in the ability of the traditional post-war European parties to solve the glaring problems of capitalism. Europe’s capitalist rulers—the dominant banks and industrialists—are terrified of losing the white working class, a fear compounded by Britain’s departure from the EU and recent mass protests against the French bosses’ pension reforms. At present, these rulers aren’t moving to smash Vox or the likes of open fascist leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. If anything, they appear to be hedging their bets--just as they did in Germany in 1933, when they sanctioned Adolph Hitler’s appointment as chancellor by the liberal-backed president.
In the most recent elections in Germany, the most committed fascist nation during World War II, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) expanded its base, even after AfD members were arrested for helping to plan a fascist coup last December. The party is polling up to 20 percent, “neck-and-neck with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind only the conservative CDU/CSU bloc” (france24.com, 3/7). In France, the National Rally headed by Marine Le Pen is now the highest-polling party in the country. Amid the ongoing rebellion over the French cops’ cold-blooded killing of a 17-year-old son of North African immigrants, it’s calling for harsher treatment of migrating workers, wholesale evictions of public housing residents for minor offenses, and the building of more prisons—the bosses’ modern concentration camps.
In their desperate attempt to hold on to power, the rulers’ mainstream liberal agents, from Joe Biden to Emmanuel Macron, are quickly adopting their own more virulent racist and anti-immigrant policies. From the Texas border to the segregated suburbs of Paris, they’re enabling mad-dog police terror. In France, the kkkops have even prohibited protests against their own racist violence! The result is a political spiral toward fascism. As the big capitalists move to the right, they’re legitimizing and energizing far-right parties that have little or no stake in liberal democracy. Vox, for example, is banning unfriendly news outlets from its events and calling for them to be shut down (Reporters Without Borders). As the bosses’ contradictions continue to sharpen, we can expect the liberals to follow suit in ditching the phony freedoms of capitalist democracy.
Only communists can defeat fascism
The working class cannot afford to sit around and wait for the capitalists to try to fix their unfixable contradictions. Economic and inter-imperialist crises inevitably lead to rising fascism and wider war. In World War II, the force that stopped full-blown fascism in its tracks was a communist-led working class. Although communists and other anti-fascists were defeated in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, they inspired workers throughout the world in the global conflict that followed, culminating in the Soviet Union’s destruction of Nazi Germany. The revolutionary Chinese Communist Party played an important role in beating back fascist Japan.
The Communist Party of Italy led the resistance that smashed the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.
Today there are but two paths before us: fascism or communist revolution. There is no middle ground, no third way. As communist theorist R. Palme Dutt observed in Fascism and Social Revolution (1934), “Capitalism in its decay breeds Fascism. Capitalist democracy in decay breeds Fascism. The only final guarantee against Fascism, the only final wiping out of the causes of Fascism, is the victory of the proletarian dictatorship.”
And so our choice is clear. Build Progressive Labor Party!
It’s a hot fightback summer! From hotel workers, grad-student workers, writers, actors, workers are shutting it down!. Earlier this year, college teachers, healthcare workers, education workers, graduate students—all have walked off the job with overwhelming public support. As we go to press 40,000 rail workers from the United Kingdom are on the picket lines leading the largest rail strike in 30 years. We may see strikes by 350,000 UPS workers in August and by auto workers this fall. Clearly, capitalism’s crisis appears to have triggered a period of sharper class struggle.
Workers are fed up with the inequalities—the rising cost of living, exacerbated by the capitalist-bred pandemic’s economic effects, stagnating wages, and more—which disproportionately hit Black and brown working families the hardest.
If you live or work in an area where workers are on strike, support the picket line! Greet workers with the revolutionary ideas of CHALLENGE and the chant, “hey hey ho ho! this capitalist system has got to go!”
Workers deserve nothing less than a communist world. That’s a world run by and for our class.