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John Brown & Harriet Tubman: Hidden history of multiracial unity
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- 20 September 2024 187 hits
The following is a reprint of an article originally published.It can be used in history and other humanities classes. This model of multiracial unity is a good foundation to set the tone for the school year.
This coming October 17 marks the 165th anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle! The fight against racist terror continues with the rebellions sparked by police murders this summer.
As workers recognize the power of unity, the cops crack down harder on protests.
The southern enslaving class was terrified by the Harpers Ferry raiders’ militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:
“I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter.”
From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black fighters did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed Black and white workers were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y. near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).
Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, reaching out to Black abolitionists and former enslaved workers.
Tubman single-handedly freed 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her “owner” tried selling her as “damaged goods.” Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.
Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, “I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.”Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as “General Tubman.” Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.
Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harpers Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.
Black rebels petrified slave-owners
To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The slave-owners, although talking of “docile” Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of “outside agitators.” They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.
Today the “outside agitators” are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, Black nationalists and sellout union “leaders” to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?
Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the “natural” segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.
Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradiction. Workers still often live in neighborhoods separated by “race” but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul “versus” country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.
Class struggle trumps racism
As in Tubman and Brown’s time, racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multiracial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latin workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to rehire all the fired immigrant workers!
In 2008 in the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers went on strike for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP had organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure. The fight against police brutality is a protracted class war still being waged today. It is the same war left unfinished by Tubman and Brown. This summer PLP joined the militant antiracist fightback against the kkkops, who in less than a year’s time, stole the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake, and countless others. The multiracial character of these protests are glimmers of the revolutionary potential of the working class.
John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach us many lessons that hold valuable to antiracists. First, militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857
Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nationwide.
The second is that multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, Black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed word to their friends and helped harbor fugitive slaves.
PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multiracial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant antiracist demonstrations, build a multiracial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery porters did against slavery — taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.
Join PLP
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party.
Today’s supporters of antiracist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 165 years ago — that revolutionaries like the raiders then and PLP now are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multiracial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.
Why joining PLP was like opening a third eye for me
This was my first summer project since joining Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and it was a life-changing experience, to say the least. I still remember how I felt when I came to my first summer project three years ago and left feeling inspired to get more involved. Still, I experienced what felt like a mental breakdown when I began to grasp how complex and immense capitalism is. I remember asking myself “How is it possible that everything I’ve known my entire life was a lie?” There was no American dream and growing up in poverty with immigrant parents, it was something I realized from a young age but wasn’t able to grasp fully.
I knew the way I was living wasn't fair but back then I felt as though it was just the way life is and I couldn't do anything about it.
I had not realized that my family and everyone around me were living this way because of capitalism. I had not made that connection and I was not able to find the words to describe what I was feeling until I was exposed to PLP and communism. This past summer project I developed an understanding of international working class consciousness and so much more. Every single encounter that I had with workers left me shocked when I realized how aware workers are of this exploitative government. From the nurses striking at the University of Illinois Hospital for fair contracts, students who came to march at the DNC in solidarity with Palestinian lives, to transit workers on the Chicago train. Almost every single worker in Chicago shared the same sentiment and understood that we could never survive under capitalism, and there won’t be justice in society unless it was ruled by the working class.
Over the past few years, it's been like a light bulb turning on in my head one by one by each comrade who has taught me more about communism and the fight for the international working class. Even though I still struggle with feeling as though I can’t fully grasp the ideas of communism, I get a sense of comfort from other comrades who share those feelings with me. I know what the comrades in the Party have been fighting for and continue to fight for.
My best advice to those who feel powerless and and aren’t sure about how to fight back against capitalism is to join Progressive Labor Party. You are not alone in your fight for a better future for the working class.
*****
Spark of hope in a love fest of union hacks & pols
Tens of thousands of workers marched in today’s Labor Day parade organized by the New York City Central Labor Council. If you thought that this was a massive display of union solidarity and strength fighting against the evils of the capitalist system, you would be sadly mistaken. In the midst of the annual love fest between the labor bureaucracy and New York’s Democratic Party hacks however, there were sparks of hope.
Progressive Labor Party members (PL’ers) participated with groups of workers who were demanding that their unions fight the genocide in Gaza and with retirees who were fighting the gang up by city bosses and the leaders of the Municipal Labor Committee against 250,000 retired city workers. They were trying to force retirees from their current traditional Medicare and city paid supplemental coverage into an inferior Medicare (dis)Advantage health plan.
PL’ers bought our message that the capitalist system is the cause of all of the problems workers face from Palestine to New York City. We say that the band-aid solutions to the cancer of capitalism is not the solution. We know that only communist revolution will end the misery faced by workers world-wide. To win workers like those who marched today we have to immerse ourselves in every struggle workers face and participate with them in organizations controlled by our ruling class enemies.
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Raise a glass for fighting the bosses
Last weekend I participated in a wine tasting fundraiser to cover expenses from this year’s Progressive Labor Party (PLP) summer project. It was organized at a comrades’ home where there was an abundance of yummy food and various spreads of desserts and dishes. The event was very well attended and we played a fun game where we were given a list of wines which were concealed in burlap sacks and we had to guess which bottle was which based on the description provided on the wine list. I gave a short report and speech urging folks to donate. I started off by summing up the successes of the summer projects and the impact the Party made at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. I contrasted their convention with what the PLP accomplished and what the working class can achieve— versus the total circus that was the convention and the ruler’s disastrous leadership— which we all witnessed in the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Here is what I said.
Neither the Democrats or the Republicans care about working-class people. They both had cops at their conventions to keep angry working-class people out. The only people who will fight for us are us— the working class. We are the ones who will save us!
Earlier this week was the presidential debate. If you watched the debate that night, you definitely heard all the racist, sexist things coming out of Trump’s mouth. Apparently, the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs. Also did you hear that women will “abort” their children after they are born if Roe V. Wade is reinstated
During the debate, he also called Kamala a communist and a Marxist which is such a joke and has said that she hated Israel. Trump has made her look better than she actually is, and we know that she’s an even bigger threat to the working class. Yes, the MAGA Republicans are like racist nazis but they aren’t as dangerous as Harris and the liberal bosses which is why we also want to protest against the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everything that is happening to the migrants and workers in this country and the genocide in Gaza was made worse under Biden and Harris.
For this reason, we shouldn’t vote in this election but organize for the revolution. A comrade also spoke about 9/11 never ending for workers around the world and how Harris received support from Dick Cheney, one of the main war criminals complicit in killing millions of workers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many comrades also chimed in and talked about the liberals’ attacks on students and made a case for why the working class will win the revolution. In the end, our friends who came donated and one even joined the Party, another nail in the bosses’ coffin.
*****
Filthy-rich DNC full of lies
I spent hours watching the Democratic Convention and am convinced that liberal politicians are the greater evil. They lie constantly and convincingly, especially if we do not know the facts. Here are some examples:
Former CIA director Leon Panetta and other military officials praised the U.S. role in Afghanistan and Iraq, never saying how the wars destroyed the countries, killed millions, and left U.S. soldiers with PTSD and devastating injuries.
UAW President Shawn Fain praised Biden as a friend of labor because he spent two minutes on the UAW picket line. Furthermore, after the union passed a resolution for a ceasefire, Fain endorsed Biden. The administration is now threatening the union for their vote for Gaza.
• Kamala cried crocodile tears describing the conditions in Gaza while calling for support of Israel to defend itself and refusing to stop U.S. aid for Israel.
• Speakers praised Kamala’s work as a prosecutor without mentioning she wanted to fine parents whose kids had many school absences.
• Kamala portrayed immigration policy as humane when Biden and Obama deported more people, including Haitians, than Trump.
• Speakers repeatedly praised Kamala as “nice,” a great friend and mother, building a cult of personality.
• Speakers and delegates represented many demographics, including “racial” categories, disabilities, generations, genders, sexual orientations, and religions. Strong optics.
• Speakers promised to lift the middle class, no mention of the working class and poor people.
• There were some references to COVID and Biden’s programs that provided a stimulus program and free tests, vaccines, masks, and medications. There was no mention that these protections are not free now; two tests often cost $20 and the drug Paxlovid is $140!
The Convention mirrored the qualities of a musical Broadway show. Fashion, makeup, hair, speaking, gestures, energy, pacing – all professionally choreographed and scripted to the last detail. A positive? John Legend and Stevie Wonder selling out for the Democrats. And sadly, the crowd of 20,000 responded with chants of USA, USA and patriotic signs. The cameras never captured any signs of dissent from the non-committed delegates or the thousands who protested genocide in the streets of Chicago. It was a lovefest for U.S. capitalism and its corporate sponsors who are setting us up for more wars and economic austerity. Shades of Germany in the 1930s?
*****
Protesters becoming subject to counter-terrorism investigations
The Intercept, 9/13–The protest did not go off as planned. In February 2023, government recruiters came to the student union at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, stacking National Security Agency-branded plastic cups and splaying out pamphlets about Navy fringe benefits… Everything about the protest had been relatively routine, right down to the arrests, but the local and federal authorities saw something more sinister…the local sheriff’s office in Oakland County, Michigan, documented the incident in a case report as a hate crime against law enforcement. The FBI recorded the incident as part of a terrorism investigation…
Over the following months…the FBI’s counterterrorism investigation unlocked additional federal resources, deepened coordination with military intelligence, generated sustained counterterrorism attention on minor acts of vandalism, and ultimately culminated in a six-person boots-on-the-ground operation conducting physical surveillance of the Stop Camp Grayling Week of Action.
Chip trade war between U.S. and China accelerates
NikkeiAsia, 8/31–An analysis of China's current semiconductor technology revealed that the country is approaching a level three years behind industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), showing the limitations of U.S. efforts to stem Beijing's development of cutting-edge chips….(China’s) SMIC, which is subject to U.S. measures to suppress advanced chip technology, is capable of producing 7-nanometer chips. TSMC supplied 5-nm processors to Huawei for the 2021 phone. Generally, the smaller the nanometer size, the higher the performance and the smaller the chip…The two chips have similar areas and performance levels…TSMC also faces growing hurdles to stay ahead of Chinese rivals technologically as miniaturizing circuits become increasingly difficult.
"The U.S. regulations so far have only slightly delayed Chinese innovation, while sparking efforts by the Chinese chip industry to boost domestic production,"... TSMC also faces growing hurdles to stay ahead of Chinese rivals technologically as miniaturizing circuits become increasingly difficult. "The U.S. regulations so far have only slightly delayed Chinese innovation, while sparking efforts by the Chinese chip industry to boost domestic production," …
India’s intelligence agency active in U.S. against Sikh independence activists
The Guardian, 8/22–A Sikh separatist leader was attacked on a California highway earlier this month in a shooting that his organization has described as an assassination attempt. Satinder Pal Singh Raju, an organizer with Sikhs for Justice and an advocate for the establishment of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, was traveling on the Interstate 505 near Sacramento on 11 August when the truck he was in was “sprayed with bullets.” He survived the shooting.
Raju is an associate of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian advocate for Khalistan who was assassinated in Vancouver in 2023, according to Sikhs for Justice. The Canadian government has said there were “credible allegations” that “agents of the Indian government” were behind Nijjar’s death. California has long been home to a strong Sikh independence movement, and Raju has helped organize referendum efforts in the state to show support for Khalistan.
Over 600 Palestinians in West Bank killed in the last year
Al Jazeera, 8/16–Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are reeling after Israeli settlers ravaged a village overnight, killing a 23-year-old man and injuring several others in the latest incident of deadly violence against Palestinians in the area. Dozens of masked Israeli settlers descended on the village, opening fire on residents, setting cars ablaze and destroying homes and other property, according to witnesses and video footage from the assault. The attack came amid a surge in Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has unfolded in the shadow of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. Nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank between the start of the Gaza war…A spokesperson for the US National Security Council said that “attacks by violent settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank are unacceptable and must stop.”
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Editorial: Nazi Israel slaughters West Bank, nationalism is no solution
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- 05 September 2024 573 hits
On August 28, Israel’s genocidal rulers launched their biggest military raid of the occupied West Bank in more than twenty years. One week later, the Zionist stormtroopers have slaughtered more than thirty Palestinians in Jenin—a longtime flashpoint for anti-apartheid resistance—and other refugee camps. Roads and hospitals are devastated; families are cut off from electricity, water, sewage systems, and the internet. Amid mass evacuation orders, thousands have fled their homes. Since Israel laid siege to Gaza last October, the West Bank death toll stands at close to 700—most killed by Israel’s military, others by racist Zionist settlers stealing all the land they can (news4jax.com, 9/4).
Israel’s bosses say they’re moving against “terrorists” and to block smuggled weapons from U.S. enemy Iran, a claim rejected by a top UN official. “I see a serious…parallel with what is happening on the Gaza Strip,” said Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “patterns of torture, of destruction, of extrajudicial killings, of uprooting” (msn.com, 9/1). Meanwhile, Joe Biden and his partner in war crime, Kamala Harris, keep pouring arms into the Zionists’ bloodstained hands, including a $20 billion package approved last month. As the Benjamin Netanyahu regime escalates its state terror against children and workers in Palestine, total fatalities—including those killed by war-related disease—are nearing 200,000 (thelancet.com, 7/10), or more than 8 percent of Palestine’s prewar population. Harris’s shameless support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” is a prescription for unchecked baby-killing and a generation of orphans.
At the same time, the threat of all-out conflict in the Middle East keeps growing. Competition to control the oil-rich region could easily lead to a nuclear conflagration and the next world war, with the U.S. and Europe on one side and China and Russia on the other. Millions of workers would be misled and coerced into killing their class sisters and brothers, all for one set of capitalist parasites or another.
Nationalism—including the Israeli nationalism known as Zionism—is toxic for the international working class. It divides workers while promoting false unity between workers and capitalist bosses. Nation states are instruments of racism, anti-immigrant violence, imperialist war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We must support the brave workers of Palestine/Israel and their heroic fightback against the Zionist/U.S. death machine.But as we’ve seen in so many courageous struggles of the past, from Vietnam and Indonesia to South Africa and Haiti, the antidote to nationalist poison can’t be national liberation. It can’t be the dead-end nationalism of Hamas and its self-serving capitalist leadership. The only cure is communist revolution, the violent overthrow of the profit system and the birth of a society run by and for the working class. Progressive Labor Party is committed to leading the working class to deliver that communist cure worldwide. Join us!
West Bank history of fightback
For nearly three million Palestinians, the West Bank is an open-air prison that they can neither leave nor securely call their home. Squeezed between Israel and Jordan on the west bank of the Jordan River, they are the surviving refugees and descendants of the Nakba of 1948, when the British and U.S. imperialists created the Israeli nation—and spurred the violent displacement of the Arab population that had lived and worked for centuries within the new country’s borders. Since the Six-Day War of 1967, workers in the West Bank have been brutalized and oppressed by Israel’s military occupation and the corrupt sell-outs who head the Palestinian Authority. To tighten their control, Israel’s bosses encouraged Zionist settlers to seize the homes and fields of Palestinian families. Today, nearly 700,000 settlers live in heavily guarded, suburban-style neighborhoods. Their utilities and schools are provided by the Israeli government. They have Zionist-only malls and supermarkets and Zionist-only roads that cut off Palestinians from water sources, relatives, friends, and former neighbors. The settlers vote in Israeli elections and are protected on their stolen land by Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth (Chris Hedges, Substack, 7/12).
The Zionists have carved up and walled off so much of the West Bank that the “two-state solution,” the magical policy embraced by lying snakes Biden and Harris, is a physical and political impossibility. For Netanyahu’s Likud Party, there can be only one state—a Zionist state. According to Likud’s coalition dealt with the open nazis of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party, “the Jewish people have the exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” including “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical term for the West Bank (The Times of Israel, 12/28/22). Members of Netanyahu’s government are now openly plotting to annex the area (New York Times, 8/28).
The current fightback by Palestinians in the West Bank has a long history. In Jenin in the 1930’s and ‘40’s, before the partitioning of Palestine into Israel and Jordan, workers rebelled against the British colonizers. In the early 2000s, young workers in Jenin, many of them teenagers, led the Second Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation. In 2002, a ten-day battle—longer than Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—killed 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians (NY Times 8/28).
The Palestinians’ fightback continues today, against huge odds, and has inspired workers worldwide. As we witness the Zionist bosses’ atrocities with horror and rage, tens of thousands have come out to protest in solidarity with their class sisters and brothers. The looming global imperialist clash presents a great danger for all workers—but also a great opportunity as horror turns into consciousness and rage into insurrection. Our Party must be prepared to lead our class to revolution in the midst of war. However dark the horizon may seem, the future is red for the international working class.
Fight for communism!
For now, we workers must fight against the genocide of workers living under apartheid in Palestine. We must do all we can to build international support for those under mortal attack in the West Bank and Gaza. Harris and Trump represent different camps of capitalists, and so they have their disagreements. But when it comes to backing the despicable Israeli bosses, they have no real disagreement. Workers must not be trapped by the vague hope for a ceasefire in Palestine, or the myth of a “lesser evil” in this fall’s U.S. elections. In the name of capitalist profit, both Democrats and Republicans plan to massacre many more workers in the Middle East—and, as war spreads and fascism rises, many millions around the globe. As Kamala Harris blustered in her acceptance speech at the Democrats’ convention, “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” As the potential next leader of the nation that wreaked the atomic holocausts in Japan and a genocide in Southeast Asia, she should be taken at her word.
But there’s an alternative to the bosses’ failing liberal democracy and its cynical, deadly choices: a revolutionary communist party. We must organize the working class not to build two states, or one state, but to smash all states in our fight for international communist revolution.
CHICAGO, August 23 – Dozens of members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) wrapped up a powerful summer project this afternoon, after nearly five straight days and nights in action against the capitalist bosses’ system of genocide, fascism and war. PLP comrades, ranging from the newly recruited to veteran members with decades of experience, traveled from across the country to directly challenge the liberal Big Fascist U.S. bosses as they held their Democratic National Convention (DNC) here.
Our revolutionary, pro-worker efforts contrasted completely with those of the liberal racists and their pro-genocide spectacle. The deadly Democrats trotted out international war criminals from the Clintons to the Obamas, all endorsing the nomination of Killer Kamala Harris for president in a desperate bid to save their declining U.S. empire in the face of fierce competition from imperialist rivals. Meanwhile, those of us in the summer project showed egalitarian communism in action: workers and students of all ages and genders striving to give leadership and act collectively.
Summer projects like these are the perfect opportunity to expand our revolutionary movement, our base in the working class, and our limits as a Party. While the bosses in the U.S. and around the world can only offer different brands of fascism to the working class, PLP remains YOUR international Party for a future free of racism, sexism, and world war!
Jumping into the struggle
Our project formally kicked off Monday morning, as our local collective held a welcoming event for all participants. We gave a rundown of the week’s activities and shared our goals of sharp agitation, building camaraderie, and political education. Equally important, we stressed the necessity of having security plans and collective discipline in the face of potential violence from the bosses’ police state.
This planning was essential as we jumped right into the first scheduled mass rally and march against the DNC that afternoon in a park near the convention site. Among thousands of workers and students, PL’ers seized the opportunity to engage our class and distribute hundreds of copies of CHALLENGE newspaper and other literature.
After hours of congregating in the park, the march was finally mobilized to begin. Our PLP contingent kept tight ranks behind our banner of “No War but Class War,” using our own marshals to keep pace. We had multiple bullhorns on hand to lead chants calling for internationalism over so-called “revolutionary” nationalism. We also called for the necessity of communist revolution.
A number of comrades made speeches in between chants, including a newer PL’er who gave her first Party speech! Once the march reached its end point, we returned in groups to our original briefing place where we socialized and created some revolutionary art to use in our actions through the rest of the week.
Base building and class struggle over voting
Day two of the project began with the first of two scheduled study groups, centered around PLP’s foundational document “Build a Base in the Working Class.” Unlike the bosses’ dishonest relationships with the working class, in which they make empty promises and outright lies to mobilize workers to vote, the Party strives to develop deep personal connections with workers to build a foundation for revolution. Comrades shared personal experiences in our small groups of how we embed our own lives in the working-class struggle and build confidence in our class’s potential to win power.
This discussion dovetailed well with our event that same evening, a mass forum titled “Don’t Vote, REVOLT!” The forum championed the international working class and revolutionary action as the real source of social progress over the bosses’ bogus elections. Two comrades gave a fiery presentation to kick off the discussion, before we broke into smaller groups to share historical and personal examples of class struggle being the engine of change. We came back together to share discussions as a group before a veteran PL’er gave a rousing speech for everyone to build PLP!
Struggling beyond reforms and nationalism
Day three kept up the pace with our collective joining forces with an organization on the west side of Chicago which has been pushing for the U.S. bosses to provide reparations to Black workers and families who had their lives destroyed by the arch-racist “War on Drugs.” Although as communists we have doubts about the likelihood of capitalism to ever remotely address the harm it has unleashed on Black workers, we were proud to participate in the group’s march to build ties with our fellow workers, talk politics, give speeches and lead chants.
Later in the afternoon, we dove deep into discussions of internationalism, first with another study group on the topic and later with a movie night where we watched the documentary Israelism about Jewish soldiers and workers rejecting the Zionist state. Given the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of the mass movement against the genocide in Palestine, it remains essential that we continue to debate and sharpen our line on what communist internationalism means in theory and practice.
Finish strong for the working class
For our final full day, we jumped right into a picket line at a local hospital where over 1,000 nurses were on strike. We unfortunately ran into some anti-communist attitudes from the union hacks and some nurses, but overwhelmingly our Party was well-received, allowing us to have good conversations and make some contacts.
By the evening, we were fired up for the final mass march on the DNC, coinciding with Harris accepting the nomination. Even compared with the previous march, there was a noticeable rise in the energy and enthusiasm in which our collective – stimulated largely by the youth – engaged with all workers present. Beyond getting CHALLENGE into the hands of countless marchers, we set the tone with our multiracial group and militant chants. We even riffed off a popular track: “Kamala, she a genocide cop! She not like us!”
Dare to struggle, dare to win
Although many of us are leaving Chicago and heading back to our areas, we realize the need to keep up the same urgency and collectivity where we’re at. Although our Party is still small, our communist ideas and leadership remain the only solution to this nightmare of capitalism and will one day be wielded by billions to take power! Dare to struggle, dare to win!
