The Chicago teachers’ strike is a fight back against the racist conditions (overcrowded classes, segregated schools, etc.) our children face every day. Strikes allow workers to feel the power that we have as a class to stop the bosses in their tracks. The liberal Democrats, Obama and Duncan are leading the racist attacks on students and teachers in the U.S. with their “Race to the Top”. The anti-racist fight that 26,000 Chicago school workers are waging is an inspiration to workers around the world, like the striking Lonmin miners in Marikana, South Africa.
SAME ENEMY, SAME FIGHT! WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!
For better wages, working and living conditions the black mine workers have shut down the world’s third largest platinum mine. Our working class sisters and brothers in South Africa are waging a strike against the mine owners and the racist liberal African National Congress (ANC). The response of the liberal black led ANC to these workers demands was the racist police massacre of 8 miners on August 8th and 34 striking miners on August 16th.
SMASH APARTHEID EDUCATION WITH COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!!
Chicago school workers are fighting for the schools our children deserve, as workers in South Africa are fighting for the lives they deserve. The fact remains that capitalism can never provide the quality of life our class deserves. The liberals Obama, Duncan, Emmanuel & Co. just like the ANC politicians are doing the bidding of their billionaire masters. These liberals are leading the racist attacks on workers from the U.S. to South Africa. To get the lives that our class deserves we must fight to take state power away from the bosses and their puppet politicians. The working class (more than 99%) produces EVERYTHING of value in the world, yet the ruling class (less than 1%) controls it all. Under communism racism would have no place in our society. Communism, unlike capitalism, needs unity not division of our class. A communist society will utilize the potential in all workers and students to build the world the international working class deserves.
JOIN PLP!! FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!!
Why would a racist vigilante stalk and murder a young black man in a hoodie? Capitalist bosses have used their racist police to criminalize black youth, justified by racist stereotypes that have led to seven times as many in jail and prison as forty years ago , 7.3 million in jail, prison on probation or on parole, 12 million ex-felons on the streets trying to find work. Totally racist: black people are eight times more likely to be in jail or prison than white people, targets of pretext stops by police and “consent” searches of their cars and bodies. Zimmerman was acting out the racist stereotype of black youth promoted by the bosses for the last 50 years as the cops, prosecutors, and courts, their racist thugs, carried out their program of mass incarceration. Zimmerman pulled the trigger, but capitalism killed Trayvon.
The racism directed especially at black male youth should be seen in the context of the racism toward 12 million undocumented workers, over 8 million of them in the labor force. Along with black men under the control of the system or stigmatized by a felony conviction, they are the most vulnerable of workers who must work under any conditions the bosses offer. Then their vulnerability and desperation is used to drive down other workers, to find people to break strikes. So they have broken one union after another and driven down wages and working conditions for ALL WORKERS.
The system of capitalism needs low wages to make the most profits. The racist attacks by the criminal justice and immigration systems create low-wage vulnerable labor. Zimmerman acted on capitalism’s racist stereotype, and capitalism is guilty of Trayvon’s death. The capitalism system must be smashed!
But what to put in its place? Communism! A system run by and for the working class, led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. Only communism can destroy the bosses’ racism, create real opportunity for all of us to develop our abilities and use them to serve our class, the working class. In a communist society youth are cherished, the abilities developed, not gunned down in the streets or rounded up in jails and prisons. We need communism now.
FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! CELEBRATE MAY DAY! WWW.PLP.ORG
The profit system is at the root of them all
Boston Bombing Whoever planted the pipe bombs that killed three people at the Boston Marathon and injured more than 150 is a terrorist who committed a heinous act of murder. We must understand that this tragedy is just one example of many in the world. Everyday people in Iraq, Afghanistan, India and in several African countries, routinely experience urban bombings. Even wealthy cities, such as London and Tel Aviv, have experienced urban bombings. They have become part of life in our unequal, unjust world.
Capitalism Kills The root of terrorism worldwide is the anger and suffering generated by poverty and inequality. Capitalism is a truly brutal system, causing massive war, starvation, and racist inequality throughout the world. This deadly profit system causes horrific destruction and loss of life from Haiti to Greece. The U.S. has the productive capacity to produce enough food to feed the whole planet. However, 40 million people worldwide die every year due to starvation. This, too is a kind of terrorism, where innocent lives are lost needlessly. Even in the U.S. today, we experience economic terrorism in the form of huge cuts in workers’ wages and benefits and massive unemployment.
US Government is one of the biggest Terrorists One of the biggest perpetrators of terrorism is the very person who claims to be our protector, President Obama. Obama and the US government claim that “surgical” drone strikes, using unpiloted aircraft, avoid civilians. They say that drones offer a low-cost, politically low-risk means of prosecuting their “war on terror” without engaging U.S. troops. However, of the untold hundreds of innocent people killed so far by drones, nearly half are children, according to a recent study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of mostly noncombatants have been killed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan alone as it fights to control the most plentiful supplies of cheap oil in the world. These are examples of state sponsored terrorism.
Bombing and Fascism Since 9/11, the bosses have been monitoring all workers more closely. Although they do this in the name of security neither the country nor the world is safer today. Similarly, the Boston bombing tragedy, will be used to win people to accept more centralized government control over our lives. Under Obama, Supermax prisons continue to lock up 1000s in complete isolation, driving many insane. Many of these prisoners are completely innocent. Under Obama, we have more racist cop terror. Under Obama, we have drone surveillance inside the US. Under Obama, we have more FBI wiretapping and more cameras watching us. As the manager of the US profit empire, Obama is leading us down the path of fascism (i.e. police state).
The working class worldwide suffers from U.S. imperialism’s march to wider wars. Our class’s answer remains to intensify class struggle against these murderous rulers and their poisonous profit system. We can see this happening in Pakistan’s mass strikes, and in workers’ mass protests in Greece and Spain. We see renewed struggle beginning to emerge in the U.S., with the fight -backs against racist cop terror and anti-Wall Street demonstrators in cities across the country.
The only solution is communist revolution Progressive Labor Party is a revolutionary communist party dedicated to eliminating capitalism as the only way to end imperialism, fascism, racism, sexism, exploitation, poverty, and terrorism. If we want peace in the world, we must eliminate the war-makers. We are fighting for communism—a society run by workers where the wealth is distributed according to need not profit.
March on May Day May Day is a holiday celebrated worldwide. It was inspired by a massive general strike for the eight-hour work day organized by workers in Chicago in 1886. On Saturday, April 27th, in Brooklyn NY, Progressive Labor Party will march to fight to smash all forms of terror including imperialist war and racist police terror, and to end racism, sexism, and wage slavery. Join us! For more info: 617-755-8396. See www.plp.org.
International Women’s Day: March 8th
Much has been written on the history of this important day for women. In this issue we thought that it would be a good idea to reprint an article by the well-known Anna Louise Strong, who lived in the USSR from 1929 to 1949 as a journalist. Although controversy surrounded her so-called "expulsion from the Soviet Union," the consequence seems to prove that Anna Louise Strong was used by enemies of communism. We hope that you will get an insight into these years.
Women in The Stalin Era By Anna Louise Strong
The change in women's status was one of the important social changes in all parts of the USSR. The Revolution gave women legal and political equality: industrialization provided the economic base in equal pay. But in every village women still had to fight the habits of centuries. News came of one village in Siberia, for instance, where, after the collective farms gave women their independent incomes, the wives "called a strike" against wife-beating and smashed that time-honored custom in a week.
"The men all jeered at the first woman we elected to our village soviet," a village president told me, "but at the next election we elected six women and now it is we who laugh." I met twenty of these women presidents of villages in 1928 on a train in Siberia, bound for a Women's Congress in Moscow. For most it was their first trip by train and only one had ever been out of Siberia. They had been invited to Moscow "to advise the government" on the demands of women; their counties elected them to go.
The toughest fight of all for women's freedom was in Central Asia. Here, women were chattels, sold in early marriage and never thereafter seen in public without the hideous "paranja," a long black veil of woven horsehair which covered the entire face, hindering breathing and vision. Tradition gave husbands the right to kill wives for unveiling; the mullahs -- Moslem priests supported this by religion. Russian women brought the first message of freedom; they set up child welfare clinics where native women unveiled in each other's presence. Here, the rights of women and the evils of the veil were discussed. The Communist Party brought pressure on its members to permit their wives to unveil.
When I first visited Tashkent, in 1928, a conference of Communist women was announcing: "Our members in backward villages are being violated, tortured and murdered. But this year we must finish the hideous veil; this must be the historic year." Shocking incidents gave point to this resolution. A girl from a Tashkent school gave her vacation to agitating for women's rights in her home village. Her dismembered body was sent back to school in a cart bearing the words: "That for your women's freedom." Another woman had refused the attentions of a landlord and married a Communist peasant; a gang of eighteen men, stirred up by the landlord, violated her in the eighth month of pregnancy and threw her body in the river.
Poems were written by women to express their struggle. When Zulfia Khan, a fighter for freedom, was burned alive by the mullahs, the women of her village wrote a lament:
"O, woman, the world will not forget your fight for freedom!
Your flame -- let them not think that it consumed you.
The flame in which you burned is a torch in our hands."
The citadel of orthodox oppression was "Holy Bokhara." Here, a dramatic unveiling was organized. Word was spread that "something spectacular" would occur on International Women's Day, March 8. Mass meetings of women were held in many parts of the city on that day, and women speakers urged that everyone "unveil all at once." Women then marched to the platform, tossed their veils before the speakers and went to parade the streets. Tribunes had been set up where government leaders greeted the women. Other women joined the parade from their homes and tossed their veils to the tribunes. That parade broke the veil tradition in Holy Bokhara. Many women, of course, donned veils again before facing their angry husbands. But the veil from that time on appeared less and less.
Soviet power used many weapons for the freeing of women. Education, propaganda, law all had their place. Big public trials were held of husbands who murdered wives; the pressure of the new propaganda confirmed judges who gave the death sentence for what old custom had not considered crime. The most important weapon for freeing women was, as in Russia proper, the new industrialization. I visited a new silk mill in Old Bokhara. Its director, a pale, exhausted man, driving without sleep to
build a new industry, told me the mill was not expected to be profitable for a long time. "We are training village women into a new staff for future silk mills of Turkestan. Our mill is the consciously applied force which broke the veiling of women; we demand that women unveil in the mill."
Girl textile workers wrote songs on the new meaning of life when they exchanged the veil for the Russian head-dress, the kerchief.
“When I took the road to the factory
I found there a new kerchief,
A red kerchief, a silk kerchief,
Bought with my own hand's labor!
The roar of the factory is in me.
It gives me rhythm.
it gives me energy."
One can hardly read this without recalling, by contrast, Thomas Hood's "The Song of the Shirt," that expressed the early factories of Britain.
"With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.
Stitch, stitch, stitch, in poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still, with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the song of the shirt."
In capitalist Britain, the factory appeared as a weapon of exploitation for profit. In the USSR, it was not only a means to collective wealth, but a tool consciously used to break past shackles.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has long served as a military arm of the major Western capitalist nations, fulfilling their need to expand into foreign territory to rob natural resources and exploit global labor markets. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been responsible for the murder of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters in the Balkans, Iraq, Libya, Palestine and Afghanistan.
Imperialist war, as accomplished through NATO, is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. What Lenin outlined almost 100 years ago still holds true today: when domestic rates of profit begin to fall, the capitalist bosses either need to expand beyond their borders, or see their system collapse. This is the expansion the world's workers witness today, with racist mass murder and fascist repression committed in the name of “free markets” and “spreading democracy.”
The way to defeat this genocide is not through lukewarm reform battles, or siding with the “lesser-evil” capitalist politicians. Any struggle that hopes to defeat imperialism while keeping the profit system intact is doomed to fail the world's workers. The only viable path for the international working-class is to join the revolutionary communist movement, led by Progressive Labor Party.
Only a mass international movement will crush the racist and sexist profit system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, and replace it with a system run by workers, who will harness the enormous potential of all and distribute the fruits of their labor according to need.
PLP has been at the forefront of the communist movement for over 50 years, immersing ourselves in militant working-class struggles in the schools, universities, hospitals, factories, military and churches! We advocate that only a mass international movement of millions fighting directly for communist economic relations will destroy capitalism, its racist artificial borders and its endless imperialist wars! Fight NATO by fighting for communism! Join PLP today!
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