Washington, DC, February 6 — Today, Metro workers led a protest against the transit system’s plan to raise fares and against its policy of refusing to hire formerly incarcerated workers. Protesters included public health workers, government workers, public housing residents, and students. They ignored attempts by transit police to move the pickets away from the entrance to the evening’s scheduled public hearings, chanting boldly against the racist policies of Metro.
The protesters then joined the hearings, and several spoke out, condemning Metro’s board for always going after working people at the fare box rather than getting money from the big developers. They make big money from the increased value in real estate that’s located near Metro stations — and it’s virtually tax-free!
Other protesting speakers condemned the policy of excluding ex-prisoners from the opportunity to even apply for jobs at Metro. Some returning ex-prisoners who had been previously hired and have had reliable work records for many years are now being fired because of their previous incarceration.
Protesting speakers noted that these new personnel policies deepen the racist oppression of black workers, since they suffer from racist arrest policies. This has been documented in great detail by the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs in a report that is available at http://tinyurl.com/l6lwwam. Once arrested and “in the system”, these workers are excluded from job opportunities. With 7,000 people returning from incarceration every year in Washington, D.C., it is vital that they have opportunities to work at decent jobs.
Along with PLP members, the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) and DC Jobs with Justice organized people to petition and testify in favor of hiring workers with criminal records. MWPHA fights for jobs and housing to improve people’s health and prevent HIV.
The growing movement to change this racist hiring policy encouraged the transit union local to present testimony at the hearing. In fact, the union’s current president, who has vigorously resisted taking up the issue, was shamed into calling for a change in the background check policy, although she carefully avoided calling it what it is: A racist attack on workers throughout the region.
Several rank-and-file workers and students who had never spoken before stepped forward to testify, demonstrating the growing strength of this movement against Metro’s policies. As the effort to reverse these policies develops, these emerging leaders will strengthen the anti-racist movement.
Local politicians, sensing a groundswell of concern over the issue, have begun to claim that they support changing Metro’s employment policy. But their role in the struggle will be to mislead. Only mass action from the grassroots will keep the pressure on Metro.
Thinking more broadly, the bosses’ use of more intensely racist policies to intimidate and coerce African American workers reflects the ongoing crisis of capitalism. This greedy profit system has led to budget crises and layoffs everywhere. The bosses are desperate to reduce wages and benefits and speed up workers everywhere to shore up their failing system. The struggle at Metro is simply another aspect of the fightback against the unjust capitalist system. Until we are able to overthrow it, we will continue to face these attacks. All the more reason to build a revolutionary communist movement against the bosses!
WASHINGTON, DC, February 5 — The president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, was in Washington, DC, this week to meet with his U.S. imperialist masters. He met President Obama in the White House and groveled before him, thanking him for assistance after the earthquake. What assistance? U.S. “aid” to Haiti has been minimal. Thousands still live in tents, five years after the earthquake. The cholera epidemic continues to take hundreds of lives. No significant progress has been made in fighting cholera through sanitation systems and vaccinations.
In fact, beginning with the U.S. naval occupation of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake, the U.S. has put its main emphasis on strengthening the UN’s occupation army (the MINUSTAH), hated by the masses in Haiti, and with Bill Clinton’s foundation’s help, building the Caracol sweatshop zone in the north of the country. What is Martelly thanking Obama for? In fact, Obama offered nothing more for Haiti at the meeting, only lecturing Martelly on the need to fight crime and improve the electoral process. Such is the way imperialist masters address their comprador tools in poor neo-colonial countries.
The U.S. State Department arranged for Martelly to visit Howard University. No academic program or unit invited him. Top university administrators introduced him at the School of Business auditorium, just as they had done last spring when the criminal Senator Rand Paul appeared on campus to peddle his racist lies about civil rights being a Republican Party priority. Most of the people who attended Martelly’s speech on his universal public-school agenda were older, conservative Haitians, university administrators and a small number of students and faculty.
We wanted to reach them with the truth: Martelly is attacking students in Haiti. At the Faculte d’Ethnologie, Martelly personally led his pink-shirted thugs to the campus, where they beat up students and trashed their classrooms. More recently, Martelly’s police blew off the hand of one student with a stun grenade and shot students with rubber bullets.
Students in Haiti have protested Martelly’s vicious attacks on them and on the working class. Their organization, GREPS, recently sent a letter to U.S. students, calling for solidarity against the criminal Martelly. PLP members circulated this letter (along with buttons from the group “End Cholera in Haiti Organization”) to over 100 people who attended Martelly’s speech and as well as in classes. The leaflet had the headline, “President Martelly, Enemy of Haitian Students!”
Several people commented that it was terrible for Howard University to host this criminal. A group of students from a course in International Development, who were required to attend the speech, were particularly interested in the outrageous attacks by Martelly on students at the Faculte d’Ethnologie. Even a dean commented that Martelly’s conduct towards the students was outrageous.
During the brief question-and-answer period after Martelly’s talk, one student confronted Martelly, saying, “The people of Haiti elected you as president, but who do you really serve, the people of Haiti or the United Nations’ occupation?”
He said that he only served the Haitian people, but that the UN was a very big help. Two lies in one sentence! He serves the U.S. and UN masters, and they help only the bosses, not the masses!
The struggle of workers and students in Haiti is the struggle of every worker and student in the world. Long live the global struggle against racism and imperialism!
Brooklyn, January 21 — Over 50 workers and youth from all over New York City gathered at Flatbush Reformed Church in the middle of a snowstorm in remembrance of Kyam Livingston, a 37-year-old mom who died while in police custody this past July. It was the six-month anniversary of her death. Kyam’s sister and mother demanded justice and accountability not only on the part of the NYPD but also from local elected officials who have yet to respond to the family’s concerns thus far.
Members of the Justice for Kyam Committee and PLP gave details about the case and explained that Kyam’s death was not caused by some unusual treatment in Brooklyn’s Central Booking holding cells. Her death was caused by systemic racist abuse which is part of the capitalist legal system.
A speaker corrected some of the false information spread by the “shack” (the press room at One Police Plaza) about Kyam’s case, making it clear to all present that Kyam died due to NYPD racist medical neglect in Brooklyn Central Bookings, and not en route to any hospital or other medical facility as police maintain.
Several members of the Brooklyn community came forward to tell their stories of mass incarceration, NYPD misconduct, and inhumane treatment at Central Bookings. One man told the community that he witnessed medical attention being denied to a teenager who had been shot, and was left to lay bleeding in the holding cell. Another woman discussed being thrown in the back of an unmarked van by plainclothes officers who did not identify themselves as police, and then having her life verbally threatened by her arresting officer while she was being led to her cell in Brooklyn Central Bookings.
Community fighters asked many pertinent questions about where the movement to end police violence should go from here, how to streamline organizing tactics across communities, and what everyday people could do to help Kyam’s family in its struggle for justice. The Justice for Kyam organizing committee had a list of many ways people could be engaged in this cause.
First, coming out to events and demonstrations on the 21st of each month would show the establishment that this is a broad-based movement with many supporters and strengthen the family’s resolve to keep fighting.
Second, signing the petition either in written form or online at www.causes.com/justice-for-kyam would be helpful in showing key elected officials that there is significant community support for this cause, and they can not walk away from the issue unnoticed.
Third, having your civic group, union, church or other organization to sponsor a forum to educate the public on Kyam’s case and the many issues it raises would be a good way to help build the movement.
And finally, but more importantly, writing down your own experience of conditions and other you’ve witnessed in Central Booking (if you have such a story to tell) and sending it via email to
Sending in your story would also make it possible for the organizers to put together a report to be sent to those government agencies and officials who are empowered to investigate and improve conditions in NYPD holding cells and bookings centers.
The family will be rallying outside of Brooklyn Central Bookings, 120 Schermerhorn Street between Smith Street and Boerum Place, at 6 p.m. on Friday, February 21, 2014. And, popular demand, a second Speakout is being organized for March 21. So if you missed the first one, you are encouraged to come to a second installment of what proved to be an informative, emotionally charged and impactful community event.
Lastly, join the fight against capitalism, the internal cause of racist killings, with Progressive Labor Party.
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PL’ers Step Up Class Struggle at Profs’ Convention
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- 13 February 2014 361 hits
CHICAGO, January 15 — A series of struggles centering around the “Boycott/Divest/Sanction” (BDS) campaign against the Israeli government’s apartheid toward Israeli Arabs and oppression in the West Bank and Gaza became a hot point at January’s annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago.
The MLA, the largest organization of academics and students of the humanities draws thousands to its convention to discuss topics in literature and language. PL members take part in the convention to push for a Marxist understanding of class, the need for revolutionary pedagogy (the theory, methods and practices of teaching) and a materialist approach to literary history. Some sessions were led by PL’ers and they participated in others. Topics included “Literature and Life after Capitalism,” and “Teaching about the One Percent, the Rich, the Upper Class and the Ruling Class.”
The MLA convention — which is sometimes called a “meat-market” — also attracts many graduate students interviewing for the few available teaching jobs. It is not surprising that almost all of them went back home empty-handed and discouraged, despite being highly qualified and willing to accept full-time work anywhere. More than 75 percent of college teachers in the U.S. are now part-time workers. In 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the number of PhDs receiving food stamps more than tripled between 2007 and 2010 to 33,655, while those with a master’s degree living on food stamps nearly tripled to 293,029.
PL members in the MLA Radical Caucus have for many years brought anti-capitalist analysis to a range of issues raised in the Delegate Assembly (DA), from the super-exploitation of adjunct labor to racist cutbacks to imperialist war. This year the Radical Caucus successfully got the DA to pass a resolution against a bogus attack on San Francisco Community College’s accreditation (and by extension, other working-class colleges). Still, the hot-button issue this year was the impact of the Israeli apartheid system on universities in Israel/Palestine.
The BDS campaign, modeled on the movement against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s-1980s, calls on institutions to get rid of their investments in companies doing business in Israel. Accompanying this economic strategy is a call for universities and professional academic organizations to boycott any institutional ties with Israeli universities. The latter largely serves to strengthen and legitimatize the policies of the government, and build the false notion that Israel is an oasis of democracy in a desert of Arab authoritarianism. The boycott expressly does not, however, target individual Israeli academics, many of whom are critical of the Israeli state and, in fact, support the boycott.
In the weeks before the MLA convention, the Asian-American Studies Association, the Native American Studies Association, and the American Studies Association passed resolutions in support of BDS. The negative reaction, especially to the ASA action, was instantaneous.
About 150 university presidents have condemned the ASA; it has been attacked by the Wall Street Journal; state legislators have threatened to cut funds to universities with American Studies departments; individual members of the ASA have been deluged with hate mail, much of it sexist, racist, and homophobic. Backed up against the wall, some members of the ASA turned to the MLA Radical Caucus with a request for support. The caucus drew up a resolution defending academic organizations from this neo-McCarthyite attack.
As it happened, this resolution never got to the DA floor because of a right-wing obstructionist attack on another, even milder resolution calling on the State Department to stop blocking U.S. scholars from the West Bank. This “Right to Entry” resolution passed, by a small margin, but the right-wingers had successfully managed to take up so much time that the pro-ASA resolution did not even come to the floor before the meeting was adjourned.
PL forces active in the MLA Radical Caucus — some of whom are now also receiving hate mail — have a lot to learn from these events as we move ahead in the struggle around academic freedom, BDS, and U.S. foreign policy. We have formed the beginnings of strong ties with left forces in the ASA; we have raised the importance of stressing anti-imperialism and anti-racism within the BDS movement, which promises to spread to other professional academic organizations in coming months.
At the same time, we need to bring a critical Marxist analysis to bear upon the limitations of the movement as it presently exists. Too often the defense of groups like the ASA invokes abstract liberal arguments about academic freedom and free speech that ignore — or at least sideline — the brutal repression of Palestinians that motivates BDS in the first place. Too often the Israeli-Palestinian situation is described in nationalistic terms, overlooking both the class dynamics within Israel-Palestine and the geopolitical imperatives of U.S. capital in the Middle East.
The anti-apartheid thrust of BDS, moreover, ignores a principal lesson to be learned from the abolition of legal apartheid in South Africa — namely, that unless capitalism is eradicated, the inequalities of racist super-exploitation will remain.
You need to be in it to win it, however. PL members should immerse themselves in the BDS movement, which currently is emerging as one of the key sites of anti-racist, internationalist struggle.
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South Africa: After Mandela, Emerging Anti-Capitalist Fight
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- 13 February 2014 595 hits
A lot of illusions in the ANC/SACP (African National Congress/ South African Communist Party) have been buried with Mandela, so that we can begin to look at the Mandela period differently. For example, there have always been struggles and movements in South Africa not controlled by them. Long before Mandela got out of prison, there was a strong mass movement in the 1980s that was independent of the ANC/SACP, most of whose leaders were exiled or jailed.
Class struggle carried on despite their absence and was led by a loosely-affiliated “radical democratic” movement called the United Democratic Front (UDF). It comprised new unions of militant black workers like the Dunlop Rubber workers in Durban; community-based organizers among the black youth called “the comrades”; draft resisters among young white men; a vigorous culture of protest and resistance in poster art, drama (“The Dunlop Play”); and militant poetry for worker audiences in the thousands (“Black Mamba Rising”).
The UDF did not develop communist politics or a revolutionary party, though it might have been fertile ground for both. But in 1990 the ANC/SACP leadership returned and began to negotiate an end to legal apartheid.
These Pretoria negotiations were “demobilizing” to UDF activists (in their phrase), and many remained wary of the Mandela forces as a result. The legacy of the UDF lived on after the 1994 ANC election victory: in the independently-organized squatter movements in the shacktowns described in the vivid book by Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors; in the opposition to the ANC/SACP/COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) neoliberal economic policy called GEAR; and in the campaign against the HIV/AIDS epidemic led by former ANC’ers like Zackie Achmat, who refused to take HIV drugs himself as long as they were not available to the poor.
Such forces continued to resist the “normalization” of capitalism under a ruling class which had narrowly opened up to include a few black entrepreneurs, while installing a new black political class in the government. Even some unions in COSATU, the AFL-CIO-like trade union federation which was the third part of “the Alliance,” continued to strike against the impoverishment of workers under GEAR. COSATU to an extent became, with left intellectuals, a home for dissents from the ANC.
Now there are new UDF-like upsurges of class struggle and new glimmerings of anti-capitalist organizing in South Africa. The COSATU-affiliated mineworkers’ union was challenged by a new more militant union group which led the platinum miners’ bloody strike against the multinational giant LONRHO and its ANC supporters. The latest turn to the left is the announcement at the convention of the metalworkers’ union (the largest union in the whole of Africa) that they were breaking definitively with the ANC, and that, because the SACP had abandoned the working class, the union would work for a new party to fight for socialism.
While still expressing sorrow and respect at Mandela’s death, the metalworkers were in fact repudiating his line and his organizations. There are many others, from students and intellectuals to wildcat strikers and the housing movement, who may be expected to sign on to a call for a return to anti-capitalist struggle in South Africa. No doubt at the outset this will keep many aspects of the old communist line (such as socialism as a transition to communism).
But a new field has been opened up with Mandela’s death. It’s up to PLP and revolutionary communists everywhere to jump into solidarity with the new struggles in South Africa. Like workers in motion in Haiti and Bangladesh, they are openings to a new communist internationale rising from the ashes of the old.
