On the last night of the Summer Project the participants watched Lily’s Education, a play set in 2018 during Trump’s first term. Most of the actors were recruited from Chelsea HS where a comrade teaches and it was performed in Chelsea too, an immigrant community that’s been at the brunt of ICE’s terror. 

Lily’s Education tells the story of a recent HS graduate who wants to go to college. When she applies for financial aid, she discovers she’s undocumented. This sets the plot in motion. Lily’s mother, Lupe, fled El Salvador with her infant daughter when she herself was a teenager. The stress Lupe experiences as a single mom keeps her laser focused on saving money to buy a house, which gives her hope in life. Lily, too, is determined to have a meaningful life. Her job at a supermarket teaches her about class and exploitation and solidarity—how to rely on fellow workers. When ICE raids their workplace, she learns that workers can unite and defend themselves.

Through Lily and her mother, the audience experiences the terror of Trump’s attacks on undocumented workers. Mother and daughter figure out how to work together despite their colliding goals. Lily's ability to transcend obstacles presents an empowering vision that can counter the fear and powerlessness that so many workers are struggling with today. The play shows what happens to a working class immigrant family when the cards are stacked against them and they are overextended with not enough support. It shows the destructive impact of the government’s racist anti-immigrant policies and how government policies, like DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), are politically motivated to keep immigrants oppressed, and divide the “good immigrants” (the young ones who can build the U.S. economy) from the “bad immigrants” (who have a harder time assimilating). 

Culture reflects reality. Under capitalism, it’s presented through the eyes of our exploiters, to promote cynicism, individualism, and escapism. Our movement needs to produce more of our own working class culture to build unity, solidarity and the spirit of resistance. We hope to stage the play again, at Chelsea HS and other parts of the community where we have a political base. We invite others to use the play and modify it as needed to fit their local circumstances. Our party should develop its use of culture and other creative means to engage others in political discussion. If you’d like a copy of the script or a video of the recording, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I was lucky enough to make it to this year's PLP Summer Project and had a great time. I was only recently introduced to the Party, so this was diving into the deep end for me, but the entire time I felt very welcome. It was incredibly inspiring to see an intergenerational struggle that is this well organized.

Speaking to the comrades who attended the 1975 project was one of the first times I’ve been exposed to leftist organizing in such a pragmatic manner rather than an exercise in theory. Hearing their stories of standing together in the face of violent racism gave me a framework of how we can push back against the transgressions we see mounting daily as ICE careens down a path of hostile militancy.

More than anything else, the biggest takeaway of this experience for me is simply that there is hope. Suffering is inevitable when alone, but struggle is possible when we unite- and with enough struggle we may finally find ourselves free of our chains. Until now, I had mistaken my suffering to be equivalent to struggle. Hearing and seeing what it takes to unite, fight, and win opened my eyes to this difference. As I move forward conducting myself in this struggle, I know this experience will help guide me.

On September 2nd, 1921 — 104 years ago this week — the Battle of Blair Mountain came to an end. It was the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history since the Civil War and a striking example of multiracial solidarity between Black and white coal miners.

Ten thousand armed coal miners marched from Charleston, West Virginia, 70 miles south to Blair Mountain, Logan County, West Virginia, to destroy the unjust system that had taken their health, their homes, and many of their lives. During the battle, striking white workers, partly inspired by the new workers’ state, the Soviet Union, joined with Black and immigrant workers. While the immigrant workers were originally sent to break the strike, the multiracial miners foiled the bosses’ plans by organizing these workers and turning the strike into a worker’s army.

The U.S. bosses, determined to crush armed insurrection, deployed bombers armed with gas and bombs left over from World War I, some of which were captured by the workers’ army. The workers faced the U.S. army, 3,000 local deputies, police, gunmen and the State Militia.

This march was the miners’ immediate reaction to the August 21, 1921, murder of two of their own by the coal bosses’ hired gunmen on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. These killings had followed years of unionizing attempts and guerrilla warfare in the West Virginia coal fields the previous winter.

Within 72 hours, 7,000 armed miners assembled outside Charleston and told the State government that they were going to “open up” Logan County for unionization and “blow it away.” On August 24, the miners’ multiracial army, white and Black, citizen and immigrant, began the 70-mile march to Logan.

As the miners made their way from town to town, their ranks swelled.” By the time they reached Blair Mountain, they were 10,000 strong. The miners were a “fully-trained, highly disciplined army ... All the officers were World War I veterans  ...
They taught the miners troop movements [and] flank formations. They formed squadrons.

The original...rednecks

The white workers, indicating their pro-working class politics over the bosses’ racism, wore red bandanas around their necks, earning the insult “redneck” by the capitalist media (Appalachian Magazine, 5/23/16).
In the bosses’ attempts to rewrite history and erase multiracial unity , it was after Blair Mountain that the “redneck” term became, in dictionaries and media, obscured and synonymous with “cracker” (originally, a child of a convict) and “hillbilly” (originally, extremely poor, often interracial, whites living in the Appalachian mountains and outside the norms of southern society).

This multiracial workers’ army were the original “rednecks.” Perhaps in the future we should refer to racists in the South the same way we describe them anywhere in the world, simply as “racists.”

Matewan

The events that led up to the outbreak of this strike and the battle are depicted in the 1987 film “Matewan.” The film shows the miners fighting the bosses’ goons from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency and killing some of them.

But the main strength of the film is its realistic depiction of the militant multi-racial unity of the miners.

The key political struggle Kenehan [union organizer]wages in the first part of the movie is the one against racism. He attacks the racism of some of the miners and calls for organizing the Black and Italian workers into the union. ‘Few Clothes’ John, leader of the Black miners, also has an anti-racist position. There is a great showdown at the mine entrance, under the guns of the company thugs, as the miners stand all together, Blacks, white, and Italian. They march and sing ‘Avanti Popolo’(CHALLENGE, 10/21/87).

The miners lose in the end, as they did in real life. They have no communist party to build for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses. In the film, as in reality, the bosses, the goons, and the courts defeat the miners in the end.

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to be the heir of this legacy of multiracial unity. With the sharpening attacks on the international working class and growing threat of all out inter-imperialist wars looming, our understanding of history is more important than ever, as workers from every part of the working class seek out answers that only a new international communist movement can provide.

The quotes in this article are drawn from a video production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, entitled Even the Heavens Weep—The West Virginia Mine Wars.

Recently, several comrades from Chicago attended the annual socialism conference, Socialism 2025, during the July fourth weekend here, sponsored by Haymarket Books. In the room designated for promotion of various groups, we had a literature table in which we could engage people in conversion as they passed by. Being in the same room gave us an opportunity to engage in discussion with other organizations, such as Students for Justice in Palestine. Our reception was very positive. In the four-day program, several dozen people signed up to get more information and communicate with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).

In the past, some of us felt going to a conference about “Socialism” was a waste of time under the assumption that the attendees are largely either friends of or members of revisionist organizations who are against  our line. There is now a consensus that this is not necessarily true and that it was worthwhile to attend the conference and put forward our line in any way we can. Evidence of this fact is that at least a few hundred CHALLENGES were distributed. We distributed other literature, including the essay Road to Revolution  (IV) which attracted interest as we explained our line that China is an imperialist country who could very well go to war with the imperialist U.S. in the near future. We also put out a four-page printed pamphlet that detailed parts of our political work and recommended some sessions in which we wanted to participate.

The conference was conducted in an academic format with dozens of scheduled talks by scholars and members from various groups. Unfortunately, this format gave minimal time for questions and open discussions after the sessions. One presenter at a session on China presented a position like ours (that China is a capitalist—imperialist country which is rivaling the U.S.). There were no obvious sessions that were promoting any candidate such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Zohan Mamdani, or the Democratic Party.