Correction:

In our July 17th issue, we published a speech on page 5 entitled Graduation Speech: Students, you are the fire of the world. We made a regrettable technical error that resulted in us cutting a significant section of the speech, specifically about how a PL’er is building ties with students and parents. We sincerely apologize. The entire speech can be found on www.plp.org

Strikers expose NEA’s racist hypocrisy

The leadership of my union, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the U.S., demonstrates how union bosses are complicit in oppressing workers in every industry under capitalism and throughout the world. The NEA claims to be a ‘social justice union’ but they have played a deadly game by pretending to support a ceasefire in Palestine while interfering with their members’efforts to educate and organize against genocide, all at the behest of U.S. imperialists and Zionists. At the same time, they lie (just like capitalists!) about their contract bargaining with the union of workers they employ, the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO), failing to deal honestly with the needs of these workers. They stand exposed siding with war-mongering, profit-stealing capitalists every time. They are only for ‘justice’ when their positions and pockets aren’t threatened! The President and Vice President of NEA each clear about $400,000 and their employees at NEASO are poorly paid union employees. NEASO members are furious that the NEA is outsourcing millions of dollars of employee work to contractors in a union busting move, undercutting their bargaining power. NEASO workers also exposed the corruption of Becky Pringle, union president, for using $8,500 of union funds for three days of hairstyling. Glad you look good, Becky – not!

In Maryland, the local union chair used deceptive means to squash any discussion of the war on Palestinians and Israel’s land grab at the same meeting where she hypocritically recognized our modern-day occupation of stolen indigenous lands in the U.S. Nationally, the union leaders are no better, dodging a serious approach to the Gaza/Palestine issue and lying about the working conditions and pay of their own employees. NEASO workers rightly decided to strike during the teachers annual meeting, forcing it to close. Progressive Labor Party teachers rallied with other teachers for Palestinian rights before the shutdown, exposing the NEA’s failure to oppose genocide. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now that only a multi-racial, communist struggle will get workers what we need. Adelante! 
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What’s nationalism?

The Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) were formed in 1961 and 1965, respectively, when nationalism was in the news media to a much greater degree than it is today in 2024.  As a result,  labeling a person or organization as nationalist (such as the National Liberation Front in Vietnam) conveyed a much clearer image of what it or they supported: a supposed revolutionary outlook hiding an actual capitalist economic-political vision of working-class exploitation by local capitalists instead of foreign ones.

Many people,  including the PLM and the early PLP,  were and still are fooled by the pseudo-revolutionary slogans of nationalists and their groupings.  However,  based on a dialectical-materialist analysis of the actions of various nationalists,  the PLP realized that so-called “revolutionary” nationalism was the opposite of what it claimed to be.  Unfortunately,  despite a full explanation of the counter-revolutionary nature of nationalism in the August, 1969 issue of PL Magazine,  no other organization accepted the PLP’s point of view.  The accuracy of the analysis in 1969 continues to be valid.  For example,  today Vietnam is a country filled with low-wage sweat shops run by both local and foreign capitalists.
Right now,  there are several individuals and organizations who are classic nationalists masquerading as “revolutionaries” behind phony sloganeering and outright anti-worker activities.  The most important of these groups are Hamas,  the Houthis in the Middle East,  and Iran.  ALL of the politicians in every country are also nationalist fakers.  Nationalists are dangerous because their rhetoric sounds pro-working class but when you examine what nationalists actually do,  it is clearly thoroughly in favor of the capitalist ruling class and against the interests of workers.

The PLP opposes all forms of nationalism.  We no longer make a distinction between so-called “revolutionary” nationalism and reactionary nationalism.  Nationalism sells-out the working class to the highest capitalist bidder.  We do support working inside nationalist organizations to expose their nefarious intentions and to win honest workers away from them.
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