Like the film’s predecessor, Avatar 2 vividly showcases the evils of imperialism as seen through the Resources Development Administration’s (RDA) violent plunder of Pandora, a habitable moon on Alpha Centauri, to extract unobtanium, a rare earth compound found there. The second installment of Avatar kicks off more than a decade after Jake joins the Na’vi and leads the war against the RDA (sky people). Jake and Neytiri are now husband and wife with four children. After turning earth into a barren planet the RDA returns to Pandora in an effort to colonize it for human settlement. Jake and Neytiri’s idyllic family life in the Pandoran paradise is uprooted by RDA’s attack on their clan, and they’re forced to flee– much like the international working class around the world does everyday to escape the deadly grip of U.S. imperialism.
Alienating class conflict
While the film does a good job of making us hate imperialism and its disastrous consequences such as genocide and environmental destruction, it promotes harmful, racist, anti-worker ideas. The most damaging aspect of Avatar 2 is that it is devoid of class analysis. Although it depicts the colonization of Pandora by the RDA and we clearly see that the Tulkan hunters are capitalists driven by the profit motive, the central conflict is not between workers and bosses, but between natives and settlers. This is clear in its one-dimensional representation of the antagonists and protagonists. In the film, most if not all humans are rotten capitalists from the imperialist RDA, to the violent military recruits, and the Tulkun hunting capitalists who wish to kill these enormous manatee-like animals to extract highly profitable age-defying serum out of their brains.
The only humans who are depicted as “good” are those who surrender to nature like Jake who goes native and Spider, the villainous general Quatrich’s son, who rejects his militaristic human father and is loyal to the Na’vi. The working class is virtually non-existent in this fanciful tale. This perpetuates the myth that workers are responsible for climate change. The does not make a distinction between workers and capitalists and lays the blame on all humanity for environmental destruction and imperialist violence. By contrast, the film relies on the racist myth of the noble savage to depict the Na’vi as pure people in communion with nature who are powerless against the forces of progress. It never shows technology being developed by the native population except for bows and arrows. It keeps them entirely ensconced within the archetype of the noble primitive. By keeping them in an Eden, the film enables the audience to identify and even sympathize with the Na'vi while still being able to disassociate themselves from them as fellow workers.
At best Avatar 2 promotes nationalistic indigenous decolonial struggles as opposed to revolutionary class struggle. In the film's climax, we witness the positive character development of the Metkayina Clan, an oceanic Na’vi species who later abandon their pacifism after captain Miles Quatrich teams up with poachers who kill a Tulkuln to draw out Jake Sully. The Metkayina join forces with the Sullys and a fierce Tulkun and defeat the RDA and the poachers. While this demonstrates an overt rejection of pacifism in favor of armed struggle there is no political ideology grounding the Na’vi’s struggle. Instead, what is waged is a moralistic war against good and evil fueled by a kind of tribal nationalism, spirituality, familial protection
Cameron builds a liberal Eden
So, why did James Cameron spend an obscene amount of money, making a movie about the wageless, moneyless, primitive communism of a population being plundered? And what message does a film made by one of the wealthiest and most celebrated directors have for workers? Though the film does communicate the need for violence against imperialist exploitation, it never creates a moment where the working class can see themselves as revolutionary agents. By making the protagonists a different species, living on another planet in the distant future, Cameron is telling the modern proletariat that they are ill-equipped to smash capitalism. They should adapt to climate change embrace eco capitalism and live in harmony with nature like the Na’vi.
Far from promoting a revolutionary message, Cameron believes that a kinder greener capitalism is possible. A self-professed environmentalist and vegan, Cameron' Avatar films promote his liberal politics, championing individualism and romanticizing primitive communism. For Cameron all worker’s need to do is be in tune with nature and live a “responsible” green capitalist lifestyle. Still, Avatar 2 is worth watching if only for the opportunities it creates to counter the myth that only a morally superior alien species is powerful enough to smash imperialism with real-life historical examples of revolutionary working-class heroism from the Soviet Union to China.
After weeks of militant multiracial fightback led by Black and Latin workers, the APD released body camera footage of the killing. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta’s killer kkkops, and politicians claim that Tort shot cops first, and thus, “deserved” to die. However, Tort’s family in Panama and friends in Atlanta called it: the police shot each other first and used it as ammunition to shoot at workers occupying the forest and killed Tort with 13 shots in the crossfire.
For the last two years, working-class fighters have occupied the Atlanta forest in protest of what fighters call ‘Cop City,’ a 85-acre $90 million police training facility through an Atlanta forest. Police forces from Atlanta to Israel will learn how to squelch working-class rebellion, especially any fightback led by communist fighters like Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
With bosses in the U.S, China, and Russia ramping up for World War III, and the U.S. bosses sinking deeper into crisis the last thing they need is militant multiracial working class rebellion in the urban centers.
The desperate rulers will need fascism to discipline the working class and will need to build more kkkop cities to keep workers in check as they spend trillions oiling their war machine while workers are pushed into starvation and homelessness. Black liberal mayors across the U.S. are proving they are the best candidates for the job.
Black-led city attacks Black workers
Georgia is a key state in the battle to win workers to pledge allegiance to the U.S. The bosses plan to build Cop City in “South River Forest,” called the Weelaunee Forest, “one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces, a prime example of environmental racism. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black” part of Atlanta (New Yorker, 8/3/22).
After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, Atlanta workers responded with mass antiracist protest, marching toward and smashing the headquarters of U.S. liberal news media– the CNN building.
Keisha Lance Bottoms— former mayor of Atlanta and now part of the Jim Crow Biden administration—supports Cop City and openly shamed the protestors’ militancy and left her position to make way for liberal misleaders like Mayor Andre Dickens, Senator Reverend Warnock and Stacey Abrams.
“Most of the residents in neighborhoods around the forest are Black and municipal planning has neglected the area for decades. The plans to preserve the forest and make it a historic public amenity were adopted in 2017 as part of Atlanta’s city charter, or constitution. But the Atlanta city council wound up approving the training center anyway…” (The Guardian, 1/23)
The bosses want to ensure that they have a militarized and functioning force to attack the working class. The U.S. ruling class and bosses all over the world want to be prepared for the international uprisings that will spring up in the wake racist police murders.
Liberal politics and police murder
PLP stands with the protests against Cop City. With Cop City now being green-lighted, it is more urgent than ever that PLers connect the struggle to what’s happening locally and internationally. Antiracist leaders are calling protests the week of February 19-26.
For our class to smash racist police terror, workers around the world must commit to building a Party that will organize and shape struggle, galvanize it and focus it, and push for communist revolution.
This is part one of a three-part series. This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2021. The history here is worth reprinting, revisiting, and relearning every year.
Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly for Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and organizers made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.
The 1930s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the USSR). Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CP). One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:
Good-morning, Revolution:
You’re the very best friend
I ever had
We gonna pal around together from now on.
…
Listen, Revolution,
We’re buddies, see –
Together,
We can take everything:
Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
(Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
All the tools of production,
(Great day in the morning!)
Everything –
And turn ‘em over to the people who work.
Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.
Fighting Jim Crow and police murder
The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CP focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home. In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas. The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of
heavy air bombardment.” In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126th Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over six hundred people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote: “The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers. But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions. Why should your windows be broken? They shouldn’t. I am sorry they are. But I can tell you WHY they are broken.” Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing. He ends by observing: “I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems. But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.”
In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore----
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over ----
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Writing and Fighting anti-communist opppression
In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the socialist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA. In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never officially joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was
the most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.
By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open activism. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.
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Editorial: U.S., China up the ante in war preparations
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- 18 February 2023 512 hits
The two imperialist superpowers are accelerating toward World War III, with more brazen provocations by the day. Since shooting down an apparent Chinese spy balloon on February 4, the U.S. military has downed three unidentified flying objects over Alaska and Canada that “might turn out to be harmless commercial or research efforts that posed no real threat to the United States” (New York Times, 2/14). The Joe Biden administration blacklisted five Chinese companies accused of links to military surveillance programs—barely a week after the U.S. expanded its footprint on military bases in the Philippines less than 200 miles south of Taiwan.
As rulers in both the U.S. and China promote an orgy of patriotism, we need to remember that capitalism is a system based on theft from workers and the violent elimination of any and all competition. As Lenin pointed out in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, war between rival imperialist powers is inevitable. Driven by their relentless pursuit of maximum profits, the capitalist bosses continuously seek to redivide the world’s markets and resources. The lethal, racist U.S. ruling class is ramping up nationalism and anti-China rhetoric to prepare for the next global war. China’s vicious, racist bosses have been whipping up mass fervor to recover “lost” territories for years. Neither side can afford to lose; neither can settle to be “number two.”
The coming imperialist war between the U.S. and China will likely dwarf World War II’s death toll of 70 million and poison much of the planet. But the international working class has no side in this fight. Only a communist revolution to overthrow the warmakers and smash their murderous plans can save our class and eliminate the root of these conflicts: the capitalist system itself. In Russia and China, in the wake of both World War I and World War II, the old communist movement turned imperialist wars into revolutionary wars, seized state power, and established workers’ dictatorships. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has a long and proud history of organizing against imperialist war and for revolution for communism.
China preps for imperialist slaughter
One year ago, shortly before the start of the war in Ukraine, China declared a “no-limits” partnership with Russia. Despite pressure from the U.S., they have not backed down. While not directly involved in the fighting, China is now Russia’s biggest customer for oil. China’s bosses are also studying the Russian playbook for lessons to apply to their planned takeover of Taiwan. According to a leaked internal memo, U.S. Air Force General Michael Minihan is predicting war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan in 2025 (South China Morning Post, 02/09). China has repeatedly warned the U.S. to stay away from Taiwan, and conducted live military exercises after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the contested island last year.
Joint naval drills by China, Russia, and South Africa were scheduled to begin on February 17. China’s rulers have steadily increased military spending, to the point where their navy is now larger than that of the U.S. (CNN, 02/03). Their ships are also more capable of navigating shallow waters in the South China Sea—another potential flashpoint.
Even as the U.S. attempts to improve its military foothold in East Asia, China is strengthening its military and economic ties in its home region. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade pact that includes Australia, Japan, Indonesia, and Vietnam, gives China a clear advantage in writing the rules for business for 30 percent of the world’s population. Despite an aging population and slowing economic growth, China has one other big edge over the divided U.S. bosses: a united ruling class that is further along the path to full-blown fascism.
U.S. bosses out for blood
The main wing of the U.S. ruling class, representing finance capital, is mounting an aggressive strategy to contain China. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is demanding a “forceful” response if China moves on Taiwan (Foreign Affairs, September-October 2022). He’s calling for a massive 27 percent increase in the Pentagon’s budget, to more than $1 trillion. Haas is demanding the “promotion of order” over “democracy and human rights”—not that U.S. foreign policy ever shied away from murdering workers en masse when money was at stake.
The proposed military buildup aligns with recent U.S. maneuvering in the Pacific. Last year’s U.S.-British agreement to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia was just the beginning of a plan to surround China with a ring of fire. The U.S. has bludgeoned Japan into buying hundreds of U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and to approve a “more lethal” deployment of U.S. Marines in Okinawa, a Japanese island less than 400 miles from Taiwan and barely 500 miles from Shanghai, China’s largest city (NYT, 1/11). The new U.S.-Philippines deal was equally ominous. According to a former Biden adviser, the bases in the Philippines “would be critical launch and resupply points in a war with China” (NYT, 2/3).
The U.S.-China trade war, declared by ex-president Donald Trump, has evolved into permanent tariffs on $350 billion of Chinese exports. China has retaliated with tariffs on U.S. exports. Economic tensions escalated last October, when the U.S. banned sales to China of semiconductors and the machines that build them, and even barred U.S. citizens from working on them. The objective: “strangling with an intent to kill” China’s technology industry, particularly corporations “closely allied with China’s military” (NYT, 10/20/22).
More recently, days after the spy balloon humiliation, Biden issued an executive order to restrict U.S. investment in China in “advanced technologies that could be used in war.” The order targeted U.S. hedge funds and equity firms trying to make a quick buck at the expense of the broader needs of the U.S. ruling class. Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a reliable stooge for finance capital, complained about those “funding adversarial actions of the Chinese government” (NYT, 2/9).
The biggest problem for the warmakers is their need to win reluctant workers to fight and die for their profits. Because capitalism feeds off racism like rats on garbage, institutions like the U.S. military are racist to the core. But to create a larger “multiracial” military, the rulers desperately need to recruit Black and Latin students into the officer corps—the logic behind mandatory enrollment programs for Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps in urban high schools (NYT, 12/11/22).
We’ve got to fight back
As bosses in both the U.S. and China up the ante in preparing for war, it’s time for PLP members and friends around the world to go on the offensive by exposing the imperialists’ motivation and strategy. We can connect these war plans to every struggle we’re immersed in, from the fightback against racist cop terror to strikes to struggles for decent healthcare. We can expose university and corporate connections to the war buildup and move masses into action against these pro-imperialist institutions. The only solution to capitalist butchery is to turn the guns around—to fight to transform imperialist wars into revolutionary wars for communism. Join PLP!
Communists in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were also present to distribute CHALLENGE. Between the presentation and revolutionary communist politics, debates and discussions show that these working class students are more than capable of both analyzing the world and organizing to change it. Workers and students like them can and should run the world—that’s communism, and our fight for that world is expanding!
The struggle spreads and sharpens
To the New Jersey college students in attendance, the first reaction to hearing about the struggle at KCC was disbelief and stunned silence. Upon viewing an improvised skit to illustrate KCC Public Safety’s appalling assault on the student, questions and comments began to pour in with some students sharing how this resonated with their own experiences.
New Jersey students took over from the KCC students in leading the discussion and sharp debates followed. Some students suggested that the police can be reformed through “better training” and “building bridges with the community” through diverse inclusion and representation on the police force. Other students responded that the history of policing itself dates back to racist slave patrols, and an inherently racist system cannot be reformed. The murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black cops is a good example that shows how reforming the police is a dead end.
From Tyre Nichols to the KCC students’ own experiences, Black cops, under a Black police chief and (at KCC) a Black college president have only changed the appearance of capitalist oppression. The underlying essence of increasing brute force, obedience and terror disproportionately targeting Black, Latin and immigrant workers —fascism— is concealed by identity politics pushed by the very same liberal politicians today sending billions of dollars in weapons to the capitalists running Ukraine and Taiwan. Soon enough, they will be sending working class youth here to kill other working class youth in Russia and China, and die for U.S. imperialism.
At places like KCC, however, the capitalists’ bootlicking servants are letting their mask of identity politics slip enough to reveal who they really serve. As our struggle spreads, communists in PLP are organizing to channel working class resistance exemplified by these students into class war against fascism and imperialist war for communism.
‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’
The success of this college event is a political victory and reveals the potential for a mass militant antiracist student movement beyond New Jersey and CUNY. For Kingsborough students and faculty, the opportunity to return to New Jersey and share organizing experiences brought us full-circle: we first came to New Jersey last year to help pack the courts during the antiracist fightback at the Rodwell-Spivey trial.
Student eyewitness reports of the bosses’ legal system threatening Justin Rodwell with over 40 years in prison for trumped-up charges inspired mass growth in KCC’s antiracist club Common Ground in defense of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers. With one of our new student comrades bringing a wealth of fighting experience from the student movement in Haiti, the antiracist movement built last year continued growing and is now leading mass antiracist fightback at KCC.
Racist school administrations in NY/NJ can catch a fire
As the event was closed and to nurture the growing bonds of working class solidarity, students and faculty heard reports from other racist attacks and antiracist struggles and discussed how to link them together. From supporting an antiracist high school teacher recently terminated to supporting student strike organizing at Rutgers, this period of relative student growth means students and faculty have a responsibility to continue building a militant antiracist movement.
Another concluding organizing lesson was the importance of consistently waging antiracist fightback while building a multiracial base with an emphasis on Black student leadership. A New Jersey student commented on the worldwide character of the response to the mass Black worker-led rebellions after George Floyd’s murder. He reasoned that workers around the world are inspired by and look in solidarity to the Black working class for political leadership, to the extent that both Black workers’ culture and resistance are appreciated and emulated worldwide. Black student and worker leadership is key to our multiracial working class movement, and as communist leaders will be the key force in smashing capitalism once and for all.
Smashing borders locally prepares us globally
Back on the KCC students’ side, organizing and traveling to New Jersey also enabled us to bridge the psychological distance between our areas. Even though New York/ New Jersey are part of the same metropolitan area and connected at points by mass transit, many KCC students had neither been to New Jersey nor felt totally comfortable making the trip. The bosses’ media obsession with subway crime sees these divisions.
While not having the same hurdles as crossing the bosses’ borders from Haiti to the Dominican Republic or Mexico to the U.S., students and workers separated by a few miles and a river overcome these barriers and are planning to do it again. From Newark to Brooklyn and New York to Beijing, the struggle continues!
