I am not your ally
I am a comrade, not an ally.
It has now been just over two months since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and workers militantly took the streets. As demonstrations erupted worldwide, racism and anti-racist fightback were thrust into mainstream focus as capitalist bosses made calls for white people to “listen,” “learn,” and most loudly made calls for allyship. White workers were asked to fall back and consider their own guilt before taking to the streets.
This paralysis, however, only serves capitalist structures that benefit from racism and a divided working class.
Fighting racism is a task for all workers and we are better equipped to fight back as a multi-racial, multi-generational, international working class.
I take to the streets with my working-class brothers and sisters because the Party has taught me that this is the only way to shut this racist system down.
While, Black workers are key to revolution and their leadership is instrumental to an international working-class uprising, that leadership does not absolve white workers from joining the front lines.
Hiding behind “white guilt” with messages of “learning and listening” is not enough to fight a racist and capitalist system. Moments of sharp struggle call for all workers to join each other and fight back.
Anti-racism in the hands of the bosses will only be manipulated to keep workers divided. It will make empty declarations rooted in intellectualism that further isolate workers from each other.
Workers learn by doing. Our fightback is strongest when we resist, rebel, and revolt together. Join the working-class in the streets today! Join PLP!
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In response to ‘the summer of smashing racists’
I am writing in response to the article “PLP History: The Summer of Smashing Racists” (CHALLENGE, 8/5). I wanted to expand on the brief summary of PLP’s activity in Boston during the summer of 1975.
The Boston 1975 Summer Project was organized by Progressive Labor Party members working in the Committee Against Racism (CAR). CAR was a campus-oriented group that PLP members helped initiate in 1973. At the time, CAR focused on the fight against racist theories of inferiority being propagated by Nazi professors like Williams Shockley and Arthur Jensen. This racist ideology justified the vile acts of gutter racists like those in Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in Boston, including white parents physically attacking bussed Black schoolchildren with rocks and bottles.
The multiracial group of 150 mostly student and teacher PLP and CAR members who went to Boston saw with their own eyes what it was like to live in a city held hostage by an aggressive racist movement whose political leaders were ensconced in the City Council and the School Committee and proudly pasted ROAR’s initials on their office windows. Hypocritical liberal politicians, like Mayor Kevin White and Senator Edward Kennedy, had for decades overseen Boston, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. The liberals built their political machines on the division between Black and white workers there. This divide between the workers allowed Boston’s business elite to reap huge profits.
Throughout that summer, PLP and CAR volunteers circulated an anti-racist petition that called for major improvements in the schools and the indictment of ROAR leaders for racist conspiracy to violate the rights of school children. 35,000 people, white, Black and Latin signed our petition, and over 100 Black, white and Latin Boston residents joined CAR. ,
CAR’s bullhorn rallies were frequently physically attacked by ROAR goon squads. These attacks followed a familiar pattern. Boston police, who shadowed us all summer, would mysteriously disappear just before the fascists showed up with bats and hockey sticks. When PLP and CAR members fought back, the racists would retreat and the cops would reappear, sometimes arresting some of us on phony charges.
There were also much bigger battles. Hundreds, led by PLP and CAR, desegregated Carson Beach in South Boston (ROAR’s stronghold), which the racists labeled “whites-only”. The gutter racists attacked, throwing rocks and bottles, allowed by the cops who were supposedly there to keep us separated and “protected”. As the battle continued and the PLP and CAR forces were pushed back by the cops, Black nationalists who were behind us attacked our white members. PLP and CAR members fought back, but we were forced to retreat.
Over the course of the summer, there were hundreds of arrests. Two Black members were convicted of assault and spent three  months in prison simply for coming to the defense of a white Boston CAR member who was being chased and harassed by ROAR thugs. 75 PLP and CAR members, planning to welcome Black students being bused, were arrested while sitting on buses that were pulled over by the cops.
The collaboration between the cops, politicians, state bosses and ROAR was blatant. The permit for our Monday, August 18, 1975 march concluding the Summer Project was withdrawn by the cops’ top brass (no doubt with City Hall’s approval) on the Friday afternoon before the march. Although the courts were rarely on our side, even this was too much for a Boston judge. He reinstated the permit Monday morning just before the march started. 350 PLP and CAR members marched to Boston City Hall, where thousands of curious Boston residents watched our rally. Scores of them joined CAR on the spot as the rally concluded.
The Boston 1975 Summer Project was an unforgettable three months of sharp struggle and tremendous comradeship between those of us who fought together. It is no exaggeration to say that the summer of struggle in Boston broke the back of ROAR and stopped the growth of overt fascism there. Lastly and most importantly, that summer played an instrumental role in deepening the commitment of scores of young, relatively new PLP members to both the fight against racism and (at that time) the fight for socialism, now communism.     
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Beware of liberalism  
CHALLENGE has been pointing out correctly that with all of Trump's fascist garbage spewing — equating him with McCarthyism, named for the anti-communist witch-hunting 1950s senator — the liberals remain the main danger, having established fascism's foundation in the U.S.
Trump’s actions and traits do resemble those of McCarthy’s — repetitive lying, bullying, outrageous charges, bluster, rambling tirades, personal attacks, egotistical self-praising, you name it. But McCarthy did not create McCarthyism.
“The blame for that rests with…[president] Harry Truman….The witch hunt that McCarthy is identified with was at its worst before he got started.” (The New Yorker, 8/3).
In March 1947, Truman — the Democratic Party's standard bearer, having become president after being selected by Franklin Roosevelt as his vice-president before FDR’s death — launched the Truman Doctrine aimed at the Soviet Union, initiating the Cold War.
As a teenager I remember how U.S. workers widely admired the communist-led Soviet Union for having  played the leading role in smashing the Nazis in World War II.
To inflame the U.S. population into anti-communism against its former ally, Truman set up a “loyalty” program to be carried out by the FBI and the Attorney-General, forcing 4,765,795 federal workers to sign an anti-communist oath. Eventually over 500 were fired.
Simultaneously, the Democratic-led Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to “investigate” whoever it designated as “subversive.”
This liberal establishment created an anti-communist/anti-Soviet witch-hunt atmosphere years before McCarthy got started. The latter just capitalized on it and used it to become the kind of fascist which Trump now personifies.
(Further case in point: Trump building on former Liberal-in-Chief Barack Obama's racist Middle East and immigration policies.)
So beware of the liberals. They will pursue any path that fortifies the profit system and attempts to blind the working class against a communist solution to capitalism’s exploitation.
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Non-violence is deadly
 In the midst of a nationwide, worldwide anti-racist fight back by protesters against cop and military terror, the capitalist bosses are worried and urging us to become non-violent and go back to work peacefully into their Covid-19 gas chambers using the Nazi idea that ‘work will make you free’ (this was the sign at the entrance gate to Auschwitz). John Lewis, a Black politician has suddenly been elevated by former Presidents, Bush, Obama and Clinton, as a non-violent saint in one of the most spectacular, publicized funerals since President Roosevelt. While praising Lewis for his younger organizing civil rights efforts, one Black woman activist said that Lewis, however, like all politicians, had to limit his  criticism of the system and that he was reprimanded and summoned to the Obama White House whenever his remarks got out of line.
When Malcolm X called for Black resistance to racial oppression, he was assassinated. When non-violence spokesman Martin Luther King supported striking Memphis sanitation workers and spoke out against the genocidal war in Vietnam, saying, “the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” he was also assassinated. During that time hundreds of U.S. cities like Watts in LA, Detroit, Newark and New York went up in flames and I remember a CHALLENGE  headline saying, “Non-violence is Dead, Organize!”
Black slave labor built the U.S. economy and capitalism and today Black and Latin poverty wages produce depressed communities and endangered workers to keep it running. But capitalism is a cancer requiring increasing blood soaked profits from worldwide imperialist exploitation, poverty and occupation which U.S. workers in Portland and Seattle are now getting a gassy taste of from their own brothers in capitalist uniforms. The endless bombed out countries we see on TV are part of 100 nations dominated by taxpayer funding of over 800 U.S. military bases worldwide creating a picture of what capitalism has in store for U.S. cities that resist its terror.
Protesters must begin to handle the truth that capitalism creates racism, poverty, pandemics, profits before health and endless wars that only a communist party like Progressive Labor Party can organize to destroy. Join us!
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