BALTIMORE—In recognition of her 200th birthday, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) held a forum honoring Harriet Tubman’s dedication to freeing Black workers from the vicious grip of slavery, sometimes literally. The rescue story of Charles Nalle, a Black man that Harriet Tubman helped flee from slavery, serves as a powerful example of fighting racist capitalism and wage slavery with multiracial unity. Black women workers have historically exposed the growing contradictions between exploitation and profit, and continue giving frontline leadership in multiracial class struggles that provides a pathway for all workers to fight for communism.
One key antiracist struggle that’s interconnected with the history of slavery is police terror against Black and Latin workers. To smash racism, bold fighters like Harriet Tubman are models for revolutionary antiracist fightback and for building a multiracial movement for communism. In this area, we have been building a base around an ongoing West Wednesday struggle, stemming from the murder of Tyrone West by Baltimore Police in 2013. Since then PLP has co-led Wednesday night meetings, titled ‘West Wednesdays’ calling out the kkkops deadly enforcement of racist class divisions through their racist murder campaigns. Five antiracist fighters involved in the ongoing struggle attended our latest presentation.
One of the most resounding lessons we can learn from Harriet Tubman is the need for boldness. She took many bold actions in the fight against slavery. We will need many similar bold actions in our fight to destroy capitalism. The slave owners and their system had to be violently destroyed, so today capitalists and their imperialist wars will also have to be violently destroyed. One such bold action that’s not well known took place in the North, after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. That national law provided for the seizure and return of enslaved people who had heroically managed to escape, and were living in supposedly “free” states. Here is that true story, which was shared during the forum.
Multiracial fighters liberate Charles
In 1860, Harriet Tubman was traveling throughout central New York State, giving lectures and raising funds. In April, she visited her cousin in Troy, New York, pausing there on her way to an anti-slavery meeting in Boston. Unexpectedly, she found herself in the center of one of the most dramatic rescues ever to occur in central New York.
A formerly enslaved worker, twenty-eight year old Charles Nalle, had been arrested while working to save money for bringing his family there from Pennsylvania, and to get his wife, a free Black woman, out of jail in D.C. where she had been arrested on suspicion of aiding Nalle’s escape from Virginia. Mr. Nalle was going to be turned over to an agent of Blucher Hansbrough—Nalle’s former enslaver—with no hearing and no trial.
As soon as Nalle’s arrest became known, the information was rapidly shared through Troy’s Black community and among white abolitionists. Immediately, people gathered outside the U.S. commissioner’s office, where Nalle was being held.
Tubman happened to be nearby, and joined the crowd that was preparing to rescue Nalle:
She climbed the stairs to where Charles was being held. When the authorities tried to remove Charles from the building to begin to take him away, Harriet Tubman leaned out of a window and alerted the mob below that Charles would be coming down the stairs and that the mob should try to get him away from the authorities. Harriet then held on to Charles as he was pushed and pulled down the stairs. She held on to him even as parts of his clothes were torn off. Local abolitionists Peter Baltimore, Martin Townsend and others also led the charge to rescue Nalle alongside Harriet Tubman (Hart Cluett museum, 2/19/ 21).
In the fight, Nalle and Tubman were dragged and beaten, as the crowd tried to pry Nalle loose from the cops. Pistols were drawn and one officer threatened to kill a rescuer whom he had grabbed from the crowd. Instantly a knife was drawn under the policeman’s throat, and the pistol was dropped. As the Troy Daily Times reported, “Twenty times the prisoner was taken from the officers, and twenty times they recovered him.” The crowd carried Tubman and Nalle to the Hudson River. Nalle was put in a boat and taken across.
But that wasn’t the denouement. Charles was re-arrested in Watervliet. Then Tubman and a crowd of [300] African Americans and whites together also crossed the river and stormed the building where he was being held for the second time and, through gunfire, liberated him. Ultimately, money was raised to buy his freedom for $650. That was in effect his fourth liberation (The Zinn Education Project).
The boldness, persistence, and multiracial nature of this rescue is admirable.
How have you fought racism?
Participants at the PLP forum were asked “What is your boldest action, or a bold action you are aware of, that was taken in the struggle against racism, or in other class struggles?” Many shared their experiences.
Despite the success of this forum, there is room to grow in leading these types of discussions. There should have been more effort to connect the fight against slavery to the current fight for revolution to defeat capitalism and to create communism.
The life and leadership of Harriet Tubman is still relevant to our current struggle for revolution and, with enough struggle, we can make wage slavery a relic of the past, like Harriet Tubman and fellow abolitionists did with the institution of chattel slavery. When workers are a part of the working class struggle, it changes the lives of all workers - for the better. And if the contradictions of wage theft and racism are not already exposed, communists must be the ones to expose these contradictions and smash racist wage theft. For most effective results – be bold and do it with multiracial unity under the leadership of PLP. Workers today must finish what Tubman started with Black workers leading the way to unleash the true revolutionary potential of our class, transforming antiracist rage and spontaneous rebellions against the police into a class conscious, organized movement to smash the capitalist system and wage slavery once and for all.
The latest crisis bulletin from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a stark reminder that the capitalist bosses stand ready to sacrifice millions of workers’ lives to preserve their profit system. The IPCC now projects global temperatures to rise even higher than the deadly target of 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed upon by the bosses at the 2015 Paris Accords (Guardian, 4/6). Extreme weather-linked disasters—wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes—are certain to get worse. Barring a fundamental change of course, one of three plant and animal species may be extinct by 2050 (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). None of these trends are “natural” or inevitable. All are the products of capitalism and the bosses who rule us—the parasites who must be destroyed for the good of the international working class.
Following the ruthless logic of capitalism, the top imperialist powers—the United States, Russia, and China—are doubling down on life-destroying fossil fuels as they intensify their competition over energy supplies, markets, and distribution routes. The world’s latest blood-soaked conflicts, from Ukraine to Yemen to Ethiopia, reflect the raging volatility and high stakes of these imperialist struggles. The rulers are hurtling down a path toward world war and nuclear destruction—the ultimate “climate change.”
Under capitalism, all current and future scenarios spell death for workers, from endless proxy wars to mass starvation. Only the working class, armed with its mass communist Progressive Labor Party and international Red Army, has the power to end this misery. Through communist revolution, we will turn the guns around on the imperialist butchers and build an egalitarian society on a habitable Earth.
Bloody oil war in Ukraine
The imperialist bloodbath in Ukraine is a clear result of the necessity of oil and natural gas to the bosses’ system. The pitched battle that has already killed thousands of workers and displaced millions more is directly connected to Ukraine’s importance as a hub for pipelines that channel Russian energy throughout Europe. The struggle to dominate Ukraine has nothing to do with the capitalists’ phony framework of “democracy versus authoritarianism.” In reality, it’s a brutal power struggle over energy supremacy.
Capitalist nations across Europe are so dependent on Russian gas to power their economies that it continues to flow through Ukrainian pipelines seven weeks after the start of the invasion. Despite desperate efforts by the U.S. imperialists and their NATO allies to sanction Russia into submission and isolate President Vladimir Putin on the international stage, the Russian bosses have so far weathered the storm. The value of the ruble recently bounced back to pre-war levels (CBS News, 4/8). Even with the U.S. and Europe threatening to end their dependence on Russian fossil fuels (a mostly empty threat to date), President Vladimir Putin and his gang of billionaires have found opportunistic buyers in India and China for billions of barrels of crude oil (oilprice.com, 4/9).
In the wake of their humiliating collapse in Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists have shot themselves in the foot yet again in Ukraine. If anything, U.S. sanctions have drawn Russian and Chinese imperialists into a tighter alignment against their shared enemy in the West. After Russia was cut off from global financial systems, China bought Russian oil and coal in their own currency, the yuan, instead of the once-standard U.S. dollar, a direct challenge to U.S. economic dominance and control (Markets Insider, 4/7).
Big Fascists’ desperation = more volatility
U.S. President Joe Biden and the finance capital Big Fascist wing of the U.S. oligarch ruling class are desperate to deflect blame for skyrocketing fuel costs to save face among voters and maintain their slim edge over their Small Fascist rivals, the “America First” wing now centered in the Republican Party. In this fight-to-the-death internal rivalry, “climate justice” will take a back seat every time. So it was no surprise when Biden announced a plan to release a million barrels of oil per day over the next six months from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The U.S. then convinced over 30 allied capitalist nations in the International Energy Agency to release millions more (NPR, 4/6).
But even as the Big Fascist imperialists struggle to contain gas prices and show some unity in their ranks, their growing weakness is glaring. Beyond their inability to prevent rival Russia from grabbing more of Ukraine, or to stop their European “allies” from forking over more than $1 billion a day for Russian gas and oil (Los Angeles Times, 3/7), the U.S. bosses have watched their once-firm influence over the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula slip away. Biden tapped into the Strategic Reserve after failing to convince the capitalist bosses in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to produce significantly more oil. They reluctantly agreed to a modest increase—and only after the U.S. bosses promised more Patriot missiles for the Saudis’ continued slaughter of workers in Yemen (WSJ, 3/21).
While the shock to the global oil market has meant a bonanza in profits for Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil company, there are political reasons for the Saudi rulers’ hesitancy. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not forgotten Biden’s attacks on his regime after its brutal 2018 murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. What’s more, the Saudi bosses have drawn closer to President Vladimir Putin since Russia joined its oil cartel OPEC-Plus in 2016 (Energy Intelligence, 2/28).
As the U.S. empire grows more isolated, so too will its desperation. As China and Russia strengthen their relationship and once-reliable allies cut deals at the U.S. expense, the Big Fascists will be pushed to take more aggressive measures to regain lost ground—with workers paying the price.
Communism will end crises of capitalism
From Chernobyl to Washington, DC, from Somalia to Iraq, workers suffer from the imperialist drive for profits. But in all of these places and more, we see our class fighting back. We must keep fighting for our common class interests as we build the PLP. We need an international communist revolution to stop the capitalist bosses and their oil wars from spilling our blood.
Only a communist society can create an ecologically sustainable future. Only a communist world will eliminate production based on profit and replace it with a system based on workers’ needs. The working class has the capacity to smash the lethal fossil fuel industry at the point of production and to end the carnage of imperialist war for all time. To fight back against the bosses’ nationalism, racism, and sexism, we need communist internationalism to raise working-class consciousness and build for revolution. Our fightback, based on political education, collective actions, and the international growth of our revolutionary communist PLP, will lead us to victory. Join us!
May Day is the working class’s international holiday. It’s a day when workers from across the globe march to commemorate our triumphs, propelled by a vision of a world without exploitation, without capitalist borders, and run by the working class. On this day, we march for the universal demands of all workers: against imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for the unity of immigrant and citizen workers, against wage slavery, against fascist police terror, and for the communist solution to all these attacks facing the international working class.
In this period, there is so much to make our class fearful and raging with anger. As the inter-imperialist rivalry between the bosses in the U.S - NATO, Russia, and China intensifies, workers are bearing the brunt of it from East Africa to Yemen. The dog fight for oil and resources is heightening starvation and poverty, and the bosses have sacrificed millions to be murdered by Covid-19.
Still, there is so much to celebrate in the midst of the bosses’ crises, from coast to coast workers continue to lead militant struggles against the bosses. From women workers in Haiti who shut it down, taking the streets with their working-class brothers and sisters declaring “ we fought for independence and we refuse to be re-enslaved.” In New York, Amazon workers led a militant and sharp struggle to unionize, halting production in the warehouses of the second wealthiest bosses on the planet. In Alabama, miners are staging one of the longest strikes in U.S. history. In India, 50 million workers led a two-day national strike that brought six states in the country to a standstill.
These fightbacks offer us glimmers of hope that our class will one day be the human race. With this unwavering faith in our class, we march on April 30 in New York City and Chicago, hundreds of workers, students, and soldiers will march for communist revolution, workers’ dictatorship, and a world free of the profit system’s horrors. In Los Angeles, many will celebrate at a dinner program around the same theme. In order to win these goals, our Party must grow until our numbers are in the millions. To win a communist world, we must become billions.
Straight out of class struggle
While the bosses try to smear May Day as being “imported from Soviet Russia,” it remains U.S. workers’ contribution to the world’s workers born in the actions of those Chicago strikers. In 1884, the AFL passed a resolution to make eight hours “a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” Workers were forced to labor “from sun-up to sundown,” up to 14 hours a day. The Chicago Central Labor Council then called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, to demand the 8-hour day.
May Day was born out of — and honors — the Chicago workers’ historic struggle for the 8-hour day on May 1, 1886, launching a general strike that spread to 350,000 workers across the country. It’s a day when workers around the globe march for their common demands, signifying international working-class solidarity.
On that day, Chicago stood still as “Tens of thousands downed their tools and moved into the streets. No smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills,” reported one paper.
On May 3, the cops murdered at least two strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works. The next day thousands marched in protest into Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown by a police agent. Four workers were killed, seven cops died and 200 workers were wounded in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre.
Nine demonstration leaders were framed for “instigating a riot.” Four were hanged. A mass protest movement forced the Governor to free those still alive after the government admitted the frame-up.
From the beginning, May Day stood for working-class internationalism. History has shown us that the fight against racism and nationalism and for internationalism is the key to communist victory. The tens of thousands who won the 8-hour day saw it eroded, so another general strike was called for May 1, 1890. At the July 1889 meeting of the International Workers Association, organized and led by Karl Marx, the U.S. delegate reported on the struggle. The Association decided “to organize a great international demonstration, so that...on one appointed day the [world’s] toiling masses shall demand...” the 8-hour day. “Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon by the American Federation of Labor....this day is adopted for the international demonstration.” This kind of international solidarity is vitally needed today.
Turning imperialist war into class war
As it progressed, the international communist movement took up the struggle and organized May 1st celebrations every year. In the U.S., it was championed for many years by the old Communist Party, with 250,000 marching in New York City in the 1940s.
But when that old party abandoned its principles, May Day was resurrected by the Progressive Labor Party in 1971 which advanced more revolutionary ideas. May Day marches have been organized by the PLP for the past 35 years, in many cities — Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Delano, and others, as well as PLP contingents in Latin America.
The rulers appear strong, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves about the enormous advantages they hold over us. But they have many weaknesses as well. They can’t hold power without oppressing us. They can’t rule the world without driving their rivals to unite against them. Capitalism is an unstable system. It will always lead to war (see editorial, page 2).
History shows that communist revolutions can seize power in the turmoil of imperialist war. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most profound event of the last millennium. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s again shook the world.
On May Day we march to remind us of our heroism as a class, reminding workers that we can no longer settle for dead-end reforms that force our class to coexist within a system that hates our existence.
Workers from China, the Soviet Union, to Cuba, have taken power and created worker’s societies, albeit fraught with errors and defeats, but left us with lessons from which to build the foundation for the egalitarian communist society we desperately need and deserve. Now more than ever we must build the Party, day-by-day, May Day marcher by May Day marcher, Challenge sub by Challenge sub, recruit by recruit, struggle by struggle for the liberation of our class. Join us!
- Information
CUNY: PLP exposes liberal racist ideas, grows CHALLENGE
- Information
- 16 April 2022 309 hits
BROOKLYN, NY—As we mark the midterm exam season, students, faculty, and members of the Progressive Labor Party at our CUNY (City University of New York) college campus have hit the ground running with antiracist, antisexist and anti-imperialist fightback! As imperialist wars ravage more and more workers around the world each day, antiracist students, faculty and PL’ers inspired by fightback in New Jersey are building a movement to smash capitalism once and for all.
Lead multiracial fightback
Following a gang-related shootout that killed twelve year-old Kade Lewin in the primarily Black working class East Flatbush neighborhood, the NYPD has launched a racist occupation force in the name of “fighting crime.” The NYPD has disrupted everyday life for thousands of workers with convoys of vehicles and floodlights. Each night at 8pm, NYPD helicopters hover close to the ground, making it difficult for children to sleep, all in the name of catching the criminals. As U.S. imperialism attempts to encircle its imperialist rivals Russia and China, this encirclement of the Black workers’ residences has nothing to do with “fighting crime.” Instead, it is about attempting to instill racist terror among the working class.
Meanwhile, in our campus club, PL’ers and friends had been tabling for weeks and showing the video of the racist police attack on the Rodwell-Spivey family in New Jersey, while collecting signatures to support the family’s legal defense of Justin Rodwell. Two young Black women students watched the video, and commented that the Newark PD behaves “exactly like they do in East Flatbush, especially since the murder of Kade Lewin.”
These young working-class women saw through liberal Mayor Adams’ racist lies about the nature of “crime” in Black neighborhoods, and knew something had to be done.
No good politicians in a racist system
Following a rush of student support and more than 50 students joining our campus club, more students began drawing connections between the racist police terror in liberal Democrat strongholds of Newark, NJ and East Flatbush, NYC. Campus staff, as well as majority Black cafeteria and custodial workers and CHALLENGE readers have also joined in organizing. Our growing student-worker alliance is connecting racist police terror in the U.S. to the sharpening inter-imperialist wars — and the need for a mass revolutionary party, not “better” politicians.
The liberal racist NYC mayor Eric Adams uses the families of tragic murder to push his own racist police agenda. But we’re organizing against racist police terror and occupation, from Newark to Brooklyn. Through neighborhood student connections with the family of Kade Lewin, we plan to send a collective letter of sympathy and solidarity and call a rally in East Flatbush. The working class of East Flatbush must not be punished! The NYPD, racist Democrat Eric Adams and “Jim Crow” Joe Biden are the real criminals and terrorists responsible for heinous crimes through the racist capitalist system they represent, and want millions of working-class youth to fight for U.S. imperialism and to die defending it!
Onward to May Day!
As we approach midterm exams this semester, our progress report so far includes more than 50 new Black, Latin and immigrant students organizing for fightback, and nineteen of our regular CHALLENGE readers among the students and campus workers taking the lead. CHALLENGE is discussed, debated and spreading within our campus antiracist club, with more fightback planned for the second half of the semester.
We also made collective plans for International Workers’ Day, May Day. When some students raised safety concerns about protesting, we collectively agreed on a meeting spot for that day and traveling to Flatbush and Clarendon together.
While the imperialist capitalist bosses from the U.S. to Russia and China plunge the international working class into another world war, our Party is growing its ranks and building especially among young Black, immigrant and women workers who will build a Red Army and smash capitalism once and for all with communist revolution. ONWARD!
WASHINGTON, DC, April 13—Bus operators at the D.C. Circulators are fighting back—96 percent of them voted to strike for wages and benefits after holding two vigorous protests where negotiations were taking place. These 150 operators have been paid lower wages than their Metro transit counterparts for over a decade, and the workers are fed up! Their struggle shows how the racist capitalist system especially oppresses Black workers and attempts to divide workers even in the same union from their brothers and sisters.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been helping lead the fight for wage parity among transit workers in the DC area for many years, and helped organize and lead the two rallies. But wage parity is not enough. Any wages mean the capitalists are profiting off of our labor. We will keep struggling endlessly to destroy capitalism and its profiteering bosses.
Make strikes schools for communist workers’ power
Workers that can organize strikes can run society and we would run it to benefit all workers, not racist, sexist, profiteering capitalists. That’s communism. Industrial workers are key to building such a revolutionary movement and the PLP has been raising class consciousness and multiracial unity through our work in the union for decades. The predominantly Black workforce in the transit industry in DC makes any attack on this group of workers a racist one, and we are calling this out for what it is.
Despite shady manipulation by the union’s lawyer who signed off on a 30-day contract extension with the company, workers showed up on their day off to vote and spread the word throughout the company to vote Yes for a strike. The Circulator operators belong to the 13,000-member ATU Local 689 but are saddled with a separate, inferior contract with a private contractor, RAPTDEV, an international company that exploits workers all around the world, and makes billions doing so. A key part to winning any strike at the Circulator is gaining the support of Metro workers throughout the system.
The son of a Circulator operator took pride in developing an energizing playlist of fightback songs to keep the picket line at the rallies going. While we started with the classic chant of “The workers united, will never be defeated!” union members on the picket line also joined in with a new chant on the spot mocking RAPTDEV’s offer of a 30 cent/hour raise saying “30 cent ain’t sh*t!” (which we all really enjoyed chanting). At one point the company lawyers came downstairs to observe the rally from inside the hotel lobby, and militant workers yelled and banged on the window until they fled like the dogs they are with their tails between their legs.
Safety blitz upsets bosses; communism will eliminate them
Union mechanics and organizers did an early morning safety blitz to make sure Circulator workers were being assigned safe buses by management, another tactic to fight RAPTDEV. Many operators had to go from two to three buses to find one that worked! Management routinely tries to intimidate operators into taking out unsafe buses, from broken horns to non-working turn signals. One bus had such poor brakes that the bus slid! The drive for profit supersedes any safety regulations under capitalism. But bolstered by worker solidarity, operators reported all unsafe buses to management. Management was so upset by our safety blitz presence that they called the cops on us!
At each rally, PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE and expressed solidarity with the workers. One PLP member gave a speech connecting the struggle at Circulator to similar union fights at Howard University and Amazon warehouses. Many workers were inspired to hear that their fight is supported far and wide, and opens the way to understanding the need to take the road to communist revolution.
