PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, November 13 — Sign reads “Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince: Professors Unite to Smash Racism!”

About 12,000 students and workers took the streets for a two-day teachers’ strike!  The entire demonstration was carried by the energy and vitality of the students. The international solidarity was vibrant. We stopped in front of schools calling on students and teachers to join the march. It was militant, and resulted in a battle between the MINUSTAH troops and students. (See next issue for full story.)

San Salvador, September 23 — It’s everyone’s job to put communist ideas into practice

The process of building a base for these ideas is hard but not an impossible task for each PL’er. We feel that the lack of commitment to establishing a collective that can plan and guarantee the accomplishment of the tasks assigned to each member explains the slow growth of PLP in El Salvador.

Our comrades have a large membership; we could have three zonal collectives and one leadership collective in charge of planning areas of concentration for each member. In this way, we can guarantee that communist theory and practice remain primary. This could also help us deal with some contradictions amongst our membership.

We are organizing among a working class not yet ready to believe in the need for a party, but that needs to find an alternative to fight against the oppression that’s suffocating and destroying it. The working class is tired of all the lies that the bosses and their associated politicians push. It’s urgently necessary to take advantage of the failures of the FMLN (National Liberation Front Farabundo Marti) government

Inter-Imperialist Rivalry

Inter imperialist rivalry is also played-out in poor countries. So-called leftist bosses play a dirty role, deceiving workers, trying to makes us believe that the Chinese economic model is better, when it’s just more of the same. The cooperatives that are being organized in indigenous and working-class regions aren’t designed to improve our lives and build class consciousness, or to foster collectivism. The support that the bosses are giving to some phony FMLN leaders is designed to create the false idea that some bosses are not so bad, but that’s a lie. Under the capitalist system there are no good bosses; they are all bad for the workers.

We must build collectives to improve our lives, and build solidarity and the awareness that as city or rural workers we can, in fact, transform this society. 

There have been over 120 reported deaths from Hurricane Sandy in the U.S., with another 100 or more in the Caribbean countries, the majority in Haiti, a reflection of the worst racist oppression in the Western Hemisphere. Sandy is the largest hurricane on record — over 1,000 miles in diameter —though it did not have the highest winds recorded.

In the U.S., tens of thousands were displaced by destruction of their homes, while in Nigeria in West Africa, the worst flooding in half a century has displaced more than two million people over the last few months and killed hundreds, with the figure still climbing. The overflow of the Niger River, the third largest in Africa, has mixed sewage with fresh water and brought crocodiles, snakes, and hippos into people’s homes. Are these exceptionally destructive events just a coincidence, or is there a common cause?

It is estimated — as only a capitalist system will do — that Sandy may cost over $50 billion. Some costs will be paid by insurance companies and other capitalists, but a majority will fall on millions of workers. It is the second most costly U.S. weather event in recent history, second only to Hurricane Katrina’s more than $100 billion in damages. No other event comes close. By capitalist reasoning, the many deaths in both the U.S. and Nigeria take a back seat to the monetary losses.

Not ‘Freak Natural Happenings’

The capitalist media are slightly more willing on this occasion than in the past to link the catastrophe to global warming. They usually describe extremely violent and destructive weather events as freak natural happenings, but as even Gov. Cuomo of New York pointed out, horrible events that used to happen once a century are now happening every other year.

This makes it harder for the capitalist media to hide the connection between these events and global warming. They still try hard to do so, or at the very least avoid talking in this context about a solution that could make a difference, namely getting rid of fossil fuels altogether (coal, oil, natural gas). Fossils are fueling not only economies, but also the global warming that produces warmer air and warmer oceans that, in turn, produce faster evaporation and immensely greater amounts of rain. But the rain only falls in certain places, robbing other places of moisture and leaving behind desertification and drought.

The accelerated melting of the Arctic Sea ice (as well as land-based glaciers all over the earth) due to the increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels created a high pressure area over the North Atlantic. This prevented Sandy from moving eastward, as hurricanes usually do, instead sending it crashing into the eastern shore of the U.S.  While the devastation was centered on coastal states, the winds and rain were felt as far away as the Midwest with gigantic waves on some of the Great Lakes, mimicking Sandy’s Atlantic storm surge that raised the sea level almost 14 feet in New York City.

In addition to wind-caused damage, many burst natural gas pipelines in New Jersey and elsewhere caused fires that burned hundreds of homes, and all their contents. Because of downed power lines, gasoline was not available even though it was stored underground at thousands of filling stations. As many as eight million homes and businesses lost access to electricity, causing food spoilage and other damage and leaving people to freeze in the dark.

So it seems that these fossil fuels are both dangerous and unreliable in a pinch. But since Nigeria is a vast source of oil profits and therefore a target of imperialist rivalry, workers there will still suffer worsening imperialist exploitation and oppression in the international competition to obtain even more of these fossil fuels.

Communist Dialectics
Gives Answers

Only dialectics, which is the key scientific tool communists use to understand the world and to describe it, makes this transition from quantitative to qualitative changes a central part of its approach to understanding everything in the world. Such ever-present transformations of quantitative changes into qualitative changes can, and do, take place over seconds, years, or even millennia. But the atmospheric changes brought about by GHGs, emitted relentlessly by all capitalist economies, have entered a phase that is taking place over a few decades. Extreme weather events, particularly where they haven’t happened before, are only the tip of the melting iceberg.

Other expected accelerations include permanent rise in sea level. For example, “normal” sea level at lower Manhattan has risen a foot in the past 100 years, and is expected to rise by at least another two feet in the next 70 years. With rivers flooding here and droughts persisting there, killer heat waves and home-destroying wildfires, migration of forest-destroying insects farther from the equator, desertification and consequent food shortages, many other effects of global warming will occur. These things are discussed fully in our essay on global warming in the Winter 2010 issue of THE COMMUNIST at www.plp.org.

Communist revolution is another example of quantitative change becoming qualitative: not changing the bosses’ system a little, but overturning it entirely, with its profits and competition. And as masses of workers, students, and soldiers in the U.S., Nigeria, and around the world swell the ranks of PLP — a quantitative change — sooner or later will turn into a qualitative change: from capitalist tyranny into a world wide egalitarian communist society run by the workers under the leadership of their communist party, PLP.

Until this occurs, capitalism’s many tragic outcomes will multiply without limit. Neither Obama, Romney, nor Nigeria’s President Jonathan will make any difference in this situation. Only the workers everywhere, through mass collective action from New Jersey to Nigeria, can do that.

 “All my life I had struggled to rid the earth of the rich man’s crimes.”

— “Two Good Arms” by PL singers
Revolution Disc 2

The graphic novel Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti by Rick Geary dramatically presents the case of two Italian immigrants who were arrested for a 1920 murder and robbery. Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolemo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, both pleaded innocent and after seven agonizing years of controversy were finally executed. The trial attracted international attention because the real reasons for it was to carry on racist attacks on immigrants. The two men were anarchists who fought for workers rights and supported socialism.

The 1917 Russian Revolution had caused panic among capitalist rulers all around the world.  A Seattle general strike in February 1919 showed U.S. capitalists the strength of the working class with radical leadership.

In November 1919, a fire bomb went off at the house of Attorney General Palmer in Washington, D.C.and bombs also exploded in Philadelphia, Cleveland and  New York. Palmer used the bombs planted by a small group of anarchists to conduct raids to deport immigrants who were political radicals and socialists. About 10,000 immigrant workers were deported as a result of the Palmer Raids.  These “Red Scare” attacks were led by a 24-year-old Department of Justice official, J Edgar Hoover!

Vanzetti learned that a friend, the editor of an anarchist newspaper, had been arrested and detained by the Justice Department.  Two months later, his friend, still in custody of the Justice Department, mysteriously fell out of a 14th floor window and died. After hearing the news, Sacco and Vanzetti decided to warn their comrades to get rid of any anarchist literature and stay out of sight. 

The police learned that they were meeting with two anarchist friends, but the cops arrived too late to arrest all four anarchists. Only after seeing Sacco and Vanzetti on a street car, were they arrested on the flimsiest excuses because of the Red Scare.  Their trial was a thinly disguised frame-up that relied more on racist and political attacks on Sacco and Vanzetti as immigrant radicals than on any direct evidence.

Widespread hatred for capitalism and substantial support for revolutionary responses around the world led to many demonstrations and rebellions in support of Sacco and Vanzetti by workers in Germany, France, Switzerland, Portugal, South Africa, Mexico,  Argentina, Japan and Australia. There were fewer worker demonstrations demanding the release of Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States, possibly due to the intimidation of Atty. Gen. Palmer and the Red Scare raids deporting immigrant workers.

In March, 1927, Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard Law Professor and later a Supreme Court Justice, wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly discussing the blatant prejudice of  the trial including:

1) The suspects were identified without a lineup;

2) The jurors were rounded up late at night;

3) The prosecution concealed an exonerating witness;

4) Atmosphere around the Red Scare and armed guards in the courthouse caused bias; 

5) Trial Judge Thayer made comments that Sacco was not patriotic;

6) The jury foreman made a statement before the trial that he already thought Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty; and

7) The stolen money was never recovered.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s case was appealed to the Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes refused to hear the case, replying, “We practice law and not justice.” The ruling class did not care about railroaded workers — they only cared about keeping workers from rebelling.

It was not until August 26, 1977, fifty years after their executions, that Governor Michael Dukakis stated the Sacco and Vanzetti were unfairly tried and convicted and “any stigma or disgrace should forever be removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolemo Vanzetti,” but Dukakis also never proclaimed their innocence.

Anarchists, leftists, socialists and communists all around the world have held up Sacco and Vanzetti as martyrs to the cause of fighting for workers’ rights and against capitalism. This graphic novel is easy to read and will be interesting to many middle school and high school students. It is well worth reading and discussing, especially about the racist and anti-working class nature of the laws and courts of the capitalist rulers.

Fighting against capitalism and racism and fighting for workers’ rights frightens the ruling class. This case shows the ruling class will use all of its state power to crush workers’ rebellions. Only a communist working-class revolution will smash the bosses’ injustice system and bring a real, if belated, recognition of the brave workers who have given their lives in the fight against capitalism.