Communist politics best self-care
Coming to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) [over the past three months] was a new type of experience that I hadn’t had before, really.  Since I was young, I had been relatively politically involved, but primarily focused on women’s and LGBTQ issues; mostly I was involved in online debate.  Several times my mom brought me to political events, though there was not really historical discussion at these events (marches, getting people to vote in local elections, etc.)

I was pretty surprised when I came to the PLP meeting.  My first and most preeminent observation was that the meeting was set up almost like a classroom and almost like a group therapy meeting.  That structure was definitely reflected in the dynamic and in my experience; the goal was to educate people on history but PLP inadvertently (or not) created a space that allowed people to let out their feelings and analysis of the world and our system.  The way that it imitated professional group therapy can definitely be connected to a topic we dealt with in one of my classes - that resistance itself can be a form of self-care.  

I decided to come with a friend the first time for a few reasons - 1) I spend the majority of my time with this friend, 2) it was the closest thing to coming alone and 3) coming with this person provided me with more expansive analysis after the meeting ended.  Only after the first meeting did I decide to bring more friends.  I was hesitant to bring one friend, but did so.  

The discussions were interesting because they were composed of people who were educated and familiar with the content and people who came because they were curious.  I think that I was better equipped to respond to that same curiosity back at school.

In all honesty I don’t really know what is next.  I guess I could continue to just try to discuss the world and educate those around me but that also does not feel effective or impactful.  I’ll be coming back to the PLP meetings and continuing to try to self educate and share my findings, but I struggle to construct a plan that is satisfactory. 

Editorial note: A plan to get to know the family and recruit this student to PLP is in place.

*****
Talking about a (communist) revolution
“Based on what you are saying, reform can have the opposite effect. It could keep people away from revolutionary ideas.” “Exactly.”

My response of “exactly” ended a two hour lunch conversation with friends and leaders of one of the strongest more militant reform unions in Chicago. All of them are committed, and tireless fighters against racism, and committed to fighting injustice, and fighting for equality for their members. The lunch I discovered is a customary send off for those workers who retire from the union.

We started lunch talking about the contentious Chicago mayoral election taking place between the two runoff candidates: Brandon Johnson (Black) a County Commissioner, former middle school teacher, and former union leader that has been endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union.  Johnson is running against Paul Vallas (white), former Chief Operating Officer at Chicago Public Schools, proponent of charters, vouchers, and balancing education budgets off the backs of teachers’ pensions. The Fraternal Order of Police has endorsed Vallas.

My friend said that the spirit of racism will always be here in reference to the election and the unions’ effort to build a union that fights for the “common good” and that history is cyclical racism. I immediately responded to both her statements and said that racism is rooted in the economic system of capitalism and it’s far from a spirit or a belief. It has a material base in capitalism and that history is not cyclical because there are times in history where race did not exist.  

Well, my friend immediately disagreed with me and I was totally taken back when two other friends said that they agreed with me. W-H-A-T! That had never openly happened before in department meetings. I acknowledged that my experience working in this union was both rewarding and inspiring.

However, if we don’t take advantage of the opportunities of pointing out the limits and the contradictions of fighting for reforms our class will get cynical and be won over to bad ideas.  My friend said to the whole table after packing up and paying the bill, “We should have more discussions like this.”

The conversation helped me realize that we must have these conversations with everyone. Going into the lunch I was feeling one-sided about my friends/leaders in terms of them even wanting to talk about revolution and reform. I also was not clear if they would be the liberals that would lead us into fascism. As I left the restaurant, I was humbled by the contradictions and the period that we are in as we build for communist revolution. I’m more confident in the Party’s line and confident that our class will win.

*****
Capitalism = bosses' dictatorship
Most people I speak to believe the government is a democracy where capitalists and workers decide issues, but capitalism has always been a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Some examples include, the majority of the French National Assembly just voted to defeat an anti-worker raise of the retirement age only to have their votes ignored by the capitalist rulers.

The U.S. railroad capitalists ignored government regulations on safety and maintenance that have greatly increased the number of train wrecks and have subjected communities to poisonous air and water pollution in Ohio and elsewhere.

Many U.S. banks ignored liquidity obligations and used low government interest rates, meant to create jobs, to provide loans to capitalists who used the money to buy back their own stocks to raise their profits and CEO’s salaries. The result so far has been worldwide bank failures and a possible recession requiring bailouts by taxpayers while the bankers retain their wealth.

The U.S. has been involved in endless wars but I can’t remember the government asking workers to vote for those wars. The wars in Korea and Vietnam that I remember offered only jail time for war resisters.

Capitalist dictatorships have been a disaster for billions of workers worldwide and now threaten a nuclear war from which the world may not recover unless workers, soldiers and youth join PLP and the revolutionary movement for communism. Read CHALLENGE.

*****
To expose bosses: keep writing simple
The article “Fight Imperialist Warmongers” in the March 15 issue of CHALLENGE, reporting on a Libertarian Party led rally at the DC Lincoln Memorial had some good points.  However, the sentences were convoluted and probably not intelligible to the regular worker.  I almost thought that it was attacking the left, but after reading it twice, I realized that it was referring to the “left and right-wing media,” which is offered as a ruling class alternative to the true left, which is Progressive Labor Party.  Simplification is the solution to most problems in all, and  especially expository writing.

Bourgeois feminism and the movement of proletarian women are two fundamentally different social movements.”— Clara Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (Equality)

March 8 marks the 114th International Working Women’s Day since its initial celebration by NYC garments workers in 1909.

The struggle for working-class women was inextricably linked to the open call for overthrowing the czarist government. Today, working-class women’s demands are filtered into reforms that benefit bosses and their ruling-class servants. Still working women around the world are at the helm of class struggle, defying the bosses sexist and racist divisions.

From Baltimore to Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Haiti, women are leading the fightback against racist police terror and attacks on healthcare.

From Afghanistan to Russia, working women militantly defied the sexist national bosses and marched against imperialist violence.

The Progressive Labor Party fights to smash capitalism along with its special oppression against women that hurts all workers. Sexism relegates women to reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work, promotes sexist culture that cheapens, degrades, enables the exploitation and abuse of women as sexual objects, and ultimately pits men and women against each other, driving the global epidemic of femicide.

Across the capitalist imperialist world, the leadership and militancy of women, particularly Black women, is essential if we want to break free from the chains of capitalist oppression. Women workers—not “girl bosses”—should run the world alongside the multiracial, multi-gendered international working class.

How it began
International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) began in New York as “Women’s Day,” organized by the Socialist Party of America. After the strike of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1909, women met at the international meeting of communist and socialist leaders, the Second International of 1910. They proposed establishing an International Women’s Day to commemorate their comrades in the U.S. By 1911, more than a million workers were celebrating IWWD.

We can also look to find lessons from the two great communist revolutions. The Soviet revolution was rooted in a firm rejection of sexism, from an early pamphlet by Lenin to struggles for more collective living experiments and job opportunities for women workers. Thirty years later, the Chinese revolution also began with an aggressive struggle to free women workers, most of them in agriculture, from the feudal oppression that had enslaved them. After both of these revolutions, important social and economic roles—including positions as doctors, teachers, and engineers--were opened to women workers as sexist notions of their “natural inferiority” were attacked. Divorce and abortion were made freely available. Relics of feudalism, such as the cruel binding of young women’s feet in China, were enthusiastically abolished.

Although sexism predates capitalism, all social relations under class societies like capitalism were always predicated on the idea of preserving private property and maximizing exploitation. Sexism, the special oppression of women, justifies dividing men and women into specific gender roles. Sexist divisions generate superprofits for the capitalists, oppress and objectify half the working-class population, in an attempt to paralyze any working-class unity.

International Working Women's Day belongs to the working class. Help build one world, one party for all workers by taking the lead in fights against police terror, exploitative landlords, and bosses. Painting banks pink and electing women politicians to a government that maintains the super-exploitation of women workers is far from the answer. Reformist solutions—such as  more "democracy"—will not end sexism. Under capitalism, they will only incentivize individuals to strive for their self-interest, the selfish, me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

Only by destroying the wage system can we bring an end to sexism. Only then will the profit system’s dogma--“Every man or woman for themselves”—be replaced by the communist principle, “To each according to need.” Only then will collective behavior overcome the selfish me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

A world led by PLP
Progressive Labor Party's deep commitment to seeing a world beyond the shallow gaze of identity politics is one of the tenets of our Party's line. Working class women are leading fights against the bosses’ racist and sexist attacks worldwide, including the recent nurse strike in New York City, protests against sexist political violence in Haiti, and battling sexist attacks in Iran against women who refuse to wear hijabs. Working women's power will be self-evident in a communist world, as they will be giving leadership in the fight against sexism. In a world led by millions of communists in the PLP, we have the basis for living an egalitarian life free from capitalist chains.

It is PLP’s obligation to expose and explain that women's liberation doesn’t come from voting, or electing women politicians to oppress us, or expanding the ranks of women CEOs to exploit us. J
For a deeper look at sexism, see PL magazine article “ONLY COMMUNIST REVOLUTION CAN END SEXISM” at www.plp.org/plmagazine

Los Angeles, CA, March 28– For nearly three years the fightback and solidarity with the Flores family has deepened, which has given life to Progressive Labor Party in Los Angeles. With consistent protests over several years, the family has grown to see that this fight is bigger than any individual KKKop or reform policy. They are now actively organizing with other families to target the liberal fascist and George Soros-funded District Attorney, George Gascon. Gascon has a liberal cover, but he has a long cop career, from going along with racist “stop and frisk” policies to refusing to prosecute killer cops.

This has been controversial because Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other organizations have championed Gascon and given him a platform with impacted families where he’s made promises to prosecute cops.  Some families have illusions that targeting Gascon will hurt their court cases, so it is significant that other families have chosen to continue the fight.  The Rodriguez family, who just won a $12.6 million settlement (read CHALLENGE, 2/15) is re-engaged in the struggle and specifically wants to go after Gascon. They have asked the Party, together with the Flores family and three other impacted families, to organize with them and start up this collective.

Democratic Party liberals support killer cops
We are planning our first action in a couple of weeks and at our first meeting, we talked about the politics surrounding Gascon and the reform struggle in general.  We discussed that despite the election of a so-called progressive D.A. and passage of state legislation like the California Act to Save Lives on the use of deadly force, which took effect in 2020, none of it has led to any prosecutions of any KKKops.  When we drafted up our first flier, we criticized not only the local liberals but also Democratic Party misleaders across the country who continue to expand their already bloated police budgets.  We called out former “Top Cop” VP Kamala Harris, for having the nerve to show her face and let alone speak at the funeral of Tyree Nichols, who was beaten to death by Black Memphis KKKops.  When it was shared among the families, the aunt of a young Latin worker who was also beaten to death in Orange County said, “I wouldn’t change one word!”

Gascon has long been connected to the liberal ruling class in California. First, he spent three decades rising through the ranks of one the most murderous police departments in the world, the Los Angeles Police Department.  He went from LAPD recruiter to Assistant Chief and was once called “the right arm” of racist “stop and frisk” Bill Bratton.   Then under the auspices of then-Mayor Gavin Newson, who has political and family ties with the billionaire Getty family that was built on violent extraction of oil in the Middle East. He was appointed Chief of Police of San Francisco in 2009.   In just two years, without any legal experience, Newsom then appointed him to Los Angeles District Attorney, following the footsteps of now VP “Top Cop” Kamala Harris.

His liberal fascism was exposed when his rhetoric was countered by his practice of refusing to prosecute killer cops in San Francisco which even inspired Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players to take a knee in response.  It also inspired impacted families and activists to protest against him at his home and run him out of the Bay area, only to be championed by BLM-LA and others.

It’s a long haul, but only communism means real justice
While all of these families recognize that the whole system is racist and guilty of murder, we still have a way to go to win them away from reformism and liberal-led organizations. Real justice can only come from the dismantling of capitalism and the capitalist state through communist revolution and joining Progressive Labor Party.  However, many families understand that it has been our Party and our leadership that has always been honest and upfront with our politics and consistent in the protests in the streets. We know this is a lifelong struggle, and they have confidence that we will be with them for the long haul.  One of the Flores siblings is in a Party club and considers herself a communist. She is bold and has pushed families to begin targeting Gascon and has won her younger sister to join our collective!  With her leadership, the future of the working class is bright!

Song of Spain By Langston Hughes

A bombing plane’s
The song of Spain.
Bullets like rain’s
The song of Spain.
Poison gas is Spain.
A knife in the back
And its terror and pain is Spain.
…
The people are Spain
The people beneath that bombing plane….
Workers, make no bombs again!
Workers, mine no gold again!
Workers, lift no hand again
To build up profits for the rape of Spain!
Workers, see yourselves as Spain!
…
I must drive the bombers out of Spain!
I must drive the bombers out of the world!
I must take the world for my own again—
    A workers’ world
    Is the song of Spain.

The last issue of CHALLENGE (3/15/23) revisited  Langston Hughes work in the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became inspired by the growing multiracial, anti-capitalist fightback, gravitating to communist politics. In this piece we dive into Hughes political and literary contributions to the anti-fascist movement during the Spanish Civil War.

Langston Hughes, a major 20th-century literary figure, moved significantly to the left in the mid-1930s—as a poet, playwright, and journalist. At a time when imperialist fascism in Italy and Germany brought on the invasion of Ethiopia (1935-37) the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and eventually World War II (1939-1945), Hughes became one of the world’s leading communist and antiracist voices.

Poems and plays: fighting racism with multiracial unity
In 1933, after more than a year in the Soviet Union, Hughes returned to California and probably his favorite subject: the working class of the U.S. He joined a group of writers and artists active in the local Communist Party (CP)-affiliated John Reed Club, named after the communist journalist and activist who covered the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution in 1917.  Still involved in protests to free the Scottsboro Eight, he composed “One More ‘S’ in the USA,” a song for a CP fundraiser for the Scottsboro victims of the capitalists’ criminal injustice system. He also co-wrote a play, never produced, called “Blood on the Fields,” about a strike by agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Beyond his local activities, Hughes joined national organizations to foster multiracial unity by bringing leading Black writers and intellectuals into dialogue and actions with communists.  He became president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, which evolved into the National Negro Congress and involved such famous cultural figures as Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Catlett. Though Hughes always worked collectively, he was singled out for racist criticism and red-baiting, not to mention surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Fighting fascism with communist internationalism
In the mid-1930s, Hughes wrote and produced plays about Black working-class life and the importance of multiracial unity, such as When the Jack Hollers. But the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935—a pure act of racist aggression—turned the attention of Black workers to worldwide racism and fascism, the phase of capitalism when the bosses discard their charade of liberal democracy (see Glossary, p. 6).  Black newspapers like the Amsterdam News reported weekly on Ethiopia.  

Then, in 1936, came the Spanish Civil War, when General Francisco Franco and his armies rebelled against the leftist Popular Front government, supported by communists, socialists, and anarchists.  Nazi Germany and fascist Italy sent arms and planes to Franco.   The Spanish “Republican” government appealed to the U.S., France, and Great Britain for aid.  But not surprisingly, the capitalist bosses wanted nothing to do with it.  By contrast, the Soviet Union sent aid and established International Brigades for workers of all nations to join.  Thousands of workers from the U.S., Black and white, many of them communists, enlisted in the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  Within the U.S., communists raised funds for the war effort against the fascists. Hughes helped organize the American Writers and Artists Ambulance Corps, which bought an ambulance for the bloody campaign.  

The International Workers Order, another communist-organized organization, sent Hughes on a 12-city tour to raise more aid for the anti-fascists in Spain.  The IWO published a A New Song, a booklet of 17 political poems by Hughes, including “Let America Be America Again,” “Justice,” “Chant for Tom Mooney,” “Chant for May Day,” “Ballads of Lenin,” and “Open Letter to the South.” In “Song of Spain,” Hughes moves from images of bullfights and flamenco guitarists to the grim realities of wary.

Hughes subsequently went to Spain himself to send back wartime dispatches to the Baltimore Afro-American and other Black news agencies. En route he stopped in Paris to deliver a rousing speech, “Too Much of Race,” to the International Writers Congress.  It included these communist ideas: “We represent the end of race.  And the Fascists know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war, and no more money for the munition makers, because the workers of the world will have triumphed” (Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, p. 90).  Hughes understood that capitalism absolutely requires racism to exploit and divide the working class.

In July 1937, Hughes crossed over the French Pryenees into northern Spain and then to Barcelona and Valencia.  By August he was in Madrid, where he joined Communist Party USA members in the Lincoln Brigade and interviewed Black volunteers for his dispatches.  When he traveled outside the city, communists helped arrange his tours.  During his four months in Madrid, Hughes circulated among other writers hunkered down in the besieged city, including Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and Lillian Hellman.  The great singer Paul Robeson also came to give concerts for the anti-fascist cause.  

Hughes red lit torch: fight for communism –workers’ power
As historian Brian Dolinar has observed, “Hughes explained to Black readers how the fight against fascism was connected to the fight against racism at home” (Dolinar, p. 87).  His essays “Laughter in Madrid,” (published in The Nation, January 29, 1938), voiced admiration for workers’ courage and their resistance to fascist rule:  “Yes, people still laugh in Madrid.  In this astonishing city of bravery and death, where the houses run right up to the trenches and some of the street-car lines stop only at the barricades, people still laugh, children play in the streets...Madrid, dressed in bravery and laughter; knowing death and the sound of guns day and night, but resolved to live, not die!”  Back in the U.S., Hughes advocated for the Double V campaign,  the connected struggles against racism in the U.S. and fascism in Europe.  

In his journalism, poetry, plays, and essays, Hughes brilliantly conveyed the experiences of ordinary workers who strived to unite as a force for history.  Progressive Labor Party can carry on Hughes’ legacy when we lead the way toward multiracial unity and revolution.

[Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition, New York: Oxford, 2002; and Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front:  Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, Jackson, MS:  University Press of Mississippi, 2012.]