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happy birthday Langston Hughes— A COMMUNIST writer & fighter
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- 21 February 2020 90 hits
He was an antiracist, a fighter, and a Black communist. Langston Hughes (1901-1967) both reflected and shaped the history of his time. Promoting multiracial unity and internationalism, Hughes serves as an inspiration for antiracists and communists everywhere.
A fighter
A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes moved to the left during the “red decade” of the 1930s, when he worked tirelessly with the Communist Party (CPUSA) to free the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women—from legal lynching (“Scottsboro, Ltd.”). He hailed Communist Party led multiracial unionism (“Open Letter to the South”), praised the uprooting of racism in Soviet Central Asia, and reported on the multiracial Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (I Wonder as I Wander).
He later nurtured the militancy of the Civil Rights Movement (“Freedom Train”) and the emergence of post-colonial African literature. While Hughes’s political organizing was primarily in his writing, his life was threatened when he toured the U.S. South giving poetry readings in support of the Scottsboro Boys, and he was almost killed by a fascist-fired mortar shell in Spain.
Poems of communist virtues
The first Black U.S. author to make a living entirely from his writings, Hughes published some 35 books, ranging from novels and short stories to plays, autobiography to journalism, musicals to children’s books. His Chicago Defender newspaper columns featuring the forthright opinions of the fictional Harlem worker Jesse B. Semple (e.g., Simple Speaks His Mind) cemented his popularity. Above all, Hughes was known for the hundreds of poems he penned voicing the anger, bravery, and wry irony of Black U.S. workers.
He also promoted the necessity for multiracial working-class internationalism. “Dreams” are, for Hughes, not idle imaginings, but expressions of actual human need. If indefinitely “deferred,” however, a dream either “dr[ies] up like a raisin in the sun” or “explode[s]” (“Harlem”). (The poem inspired the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun.) What is needed is a world “Where black or white, / Whatever race you be, / Will share the bounties of the earth/ And every man is free” (“I Dream a World”).
Bosses censor his revolutionary side
What most people know—or think they know—about Hughes, however, has been warped by anticommunism. Grilled about some of his revolutionary poems of the 1930s (“Goodbye, Christ,” “Good Morning, Revolution!”, and “Put Another ‘S’ in the U.S.A.”) he was hauled before Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in 1954. Hughes never “named names” or repudiated the Communist Party. But he increasingly engaged in self-censorship, ventriloquizing his sharpest criticisms of ruling-class red-baiting through the sardonic commentary of Jesse B. Semple and excluding all his Depression-era pro-communist poetry from the 1957 edition of his Selected Poems. Both Hughes the man and Hughes the poet were victims of the Cold War.
The political censorship of Hughes’s pro-communism still continues in the selection of Hughes’s works in the textbooks used in high school and college classrooms. The standard anthologies feature almost exclusively his 1920s blues- and jazz-inflected poems, such as “The Weary Blues,” and works affirming the value and beauty of Negro identity, such as the essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the short story “The Blues I’m Playing,” and the poems “Mother to Son” (“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“My soul has grown deep like the rivers”).
The effect of selecting such texts and excluding his pro-communist, anti-capitalist works is to convert Hughes’s revolutionary, class-based politics into a politics of Black cultural nationalism that overlooks the grounding of racism in capitalist social relations. The pro-communist Hughes is then made safe for the capitalist classroom. The Hughes who celebrated the achievements of Soviet socialism is expelled.
Weaknesses of old movement
Because of his closeness to the CPUSA, however, Hughes’s works reflect not just its strengths but also its shortcomings. For instance, his ambiguous relationship to U.S. patriotism is linked to the CPUSA’s view (especially pronounced during the era of the Popular Front Against Fascism (1936-1945)—of communism as “twentieth-century Americanism.” In the frequently anthologized “I Too,” the “darker brother” proclaims that he’ll eventually be invited to the table from which he has been excluded because “they’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed . . . I, too, am America.”
In “Let America Be America Again,” there is a tug-of-war between two speakers, one readily assimilated to the American Dream, the other voicing the standpoint of those historically excluded (“the Negro . . . the poor white, . . . the red man . . . the immigrant”) who proclaim, “America never was America to me.” But the poem ends, “And yet I swear this oath—America will be!”
Here a liberal politics of inclusion—premised upon the extension of U.S. “democracy”—substitutes for the revolutionary view that U.S. capitalism is founded upon racist exploitation and division, and that only proletarian revolution can produce the “dream” of a better world.
Progressive Labor Party (its founding members broke away from the CPUSA in the early 1960s) has learned from the mistakes of the old communist movement. It is now clear that in the contradiction between nationalism and internationalism, communists must denounce nationalism in all forms. Nationalist politics only serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class.
Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration speech is a case in point. Quoting Hughes, he asserted, “I too, am America,” as well as in Martin Luther King’s riffing on “Let America Be America Again” in several key speeches (Miller 2016, 2020).
Clearly, ruling class defenders have no trouble co-opting ideas when it suits them.
Undying commitment
Despite these ideological contradictions, Hughes’s principal legacy is an undying commitment to the struggle against racism and the fight for an egalitarian communist future, one in which the blood-sucking “life robbers” of colonialism and imperialism will be overthrown by the “Red Armies of the international proletariat / Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown . . . / Rais[ing] the blood-red flag that / Never will come down!” (“Always the Same”). Hughes was a poet laureate for the workers of the world.
CHICAGO, February 8—Around 70 people came together on the city’s south side this evening to celebrate Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) ongoing tradition of recognizing and taking leadership from working-class Black communists. A broad age-range of workers attended, from students in their teens to people with four or more decades of fighting this fascist system.
Features of our third annual Black and Red Dinner were heart-felt, personal and political stories from two comrades, and attendance from a greater number of younger people who responded to our message of antiracism and the leadership of Black workers being a key part of our Party’s fight for communist-led worker power.
The program was engaging, and those who joined us for the first time noted that we didn’t just give lip-service to Black comrades leading the work. It is a stance proven by action that we carry out as a necessary part of worldwide communist revolution.
An ongoing tradition of communist Black leadership
For the dinner’s keynote speech, a comrade presented the history of the antiracist line of the Party, and recognition of the continued importance of leadership from Black workers to our movement. He talked about the how early communist theorist and revolutionary Karl Marx was very much influenced by communal societies he studied from all over the world. Marx was outspoken about the enslavement and continued oppression of Black people in the United States, noting in his influential book Capital that “Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”
The comrade went on to highlight the leadership of Black workers here in Chicago, and around the world. Writers and activists, noted communists and those influenced by communist theories/theorists, such as Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, the founders of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and more. They all wrote about recognizing that the fight for liberation from racism is linked to class oppression internationally.
The second speaker of the night talked about her influences to both join the Party in college, and now taking on further responsibility for leading the work. Noting the mentoring she received from another Black comrade, she said she was made more confident in her abilities because of the example set by the people who won her to PLP. She dedicated her speech to her teenage daughter—herself a maturing antiracist fighter—passing encouragement through the generations.
Working-class inspired music and games
One of the highlights of the event was the contagiously-enthusiastic participation of about twenty youth present. During an entertaining songwriting activity, a mixed group of teens, comrades, and adult workers came up with powerful and inspiring lyrics that were also bilingual, to a tune of artist Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road (Remix):
We got the workers in the front, bosses on their a**, Power to the People, Power to the Working Class!
Fighting for our rights, every day and night, power in our sight, we will all unite…
The bosses can’t tell us nothing, they can’t tell us nothing...
Obreros unidos, ¡jamás serán vencidos! Arriba, abajo — ¡Los jefes al carajo! (Workers united, will never be defeated! Up, down – Bosses, go to hell!)
The entire room erupted in applause!
Another fun activity the event organizers put together was a version of Jeopardy, with all of the categories being about Black communists, including historical events (such as PLP beating down the Nazis and integrating Chicago’s Marquette Park in the 1970s) and personal quotes. Once again, the high school students in the room took the lead, answering the most questions, hands down. It was truly inspirational to watch these youth—the future of our Party—embracing antiracist history and politics.
Antiracist action and theory
During this election season, the liberals who have already been proven to be the main threat for our class, are willing to promise every concession imaginable. What they will never follow through on is true freedom from the continued humiliation and death of racism, sexism, capitalism and imperialism.
In our Party’s document, Black Workers’ Leadership: Key Revolutionary Force (see www.plp.org) we explain the need to fight racism in all aspects of our work: “Racism is the main tool the ruling class has to divide the working class.” We understand that racism and capitalism go hand in hand. Voting for liberals or whatever “lesser-evil” presents itself under capitalism will never free us from their destructive effects. The exploitation of Black workers worldwide had been integral to the growth of this murderous system.
The historical fightback and continued leadership of Black workers in our ranks has strengthened our understanding and actions. Those who have experienced the worst of this system must give leadership in tearing it down. Join us in rising up and fighting back!
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75th anniversary: Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp
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- 21 February 2020 69 hits
May, 1945 was the end of one of the most horrendous capitalist systems the world has suffered. The fascist Nazi government of Germany led by Adolph Hitler was defeated by the communist government of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Today there are many anticommunist lies about World War II, the Nazi period, and especially about the role of the then-socialist Soviet Union in smashing the fascist German forces. As we commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration camp let’s refute some of those lies.
Liberals and conservatives lie about World War II
The capitalist media never stops rewriting history. In the Public Broadcasting System’s series “The Messengers,” one of the episodes begins with someone saying: “My biggest mistake was to believe that the Red Army won World War II” (PBS, 1995). Actually the Red Army did win World War II. Nine out of 10 German casualties were at the hands of the Red Army.
The liberal PBS is not alone in lying about WW II. In 1995 the “historian” of the U.S. House of Representatives, Christina Jeffrey, was fired when it was publicized that in 1986 she had criticized a school curriculum on the Holocaust by complaining that the perspectives of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were not included in it (New York Times, 1/11/95).
The truth about the Nazis
In 1933, Hitler took power with the support of most of the German bosses. He began what he thought was going to be the “Thousand-Year Reich [empire]”. He ordered the building of the Dachau, Oranienburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. These were the first of what was to become 900 big and small concentration camps that existed until the end of the war. One of Hitler’s first decrees introduced the concept of Schutzhaft – preventive imprisonment of “enemies of the state.” First, last, and always, these were mainly communists.
Hitler was very specific about the role of these camps. “Brutality inspires respect … The masses need someone to inspire fear and make them tremble and submissive … I don’t want concentration camps to become family housing. Terror is the most efficient political instrument ... Those who are discontent and disobey us will think twice before confronting us if they know what is waiting for them in the concentration camps.”
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz
Twelve years later, the Third Reich’s “thousand year” reign of terror was cut short by the communist movement. Around 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian Front of the advancing Red Army, led by Marshal Ivan S. Konev, saw a sign that read: “Arbeit Macht Frei” – “Work Makes You Free” – on the top of the main gate of Auschwitz. The Nazis called these death camps “labor camps.” These troops saw with their own eyes what up to then was only a suspicion based on messages smuggled out from the concentration camps: the incarceration and systematic elimination of Jewish and Romani workers, and political “deviates” (read: pro-communists). It was all part of the plan created by the top leadership of the Third Reich, which murdered millions (El Mundo, 1/8/95).
The Red Army troops found 5,000 prisoners. These prisoners were left behind by the Nazis because they were too weak to move (and, in spite of the efforts by the Red Army to save them, many died). A few days earlier, knowing the Red Army was getting closer to Auschwitz, Hitler ordered the camp closed. On January 18, the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel-elite Nazi squadron)–Hitler’s killer-troops—led the “March of Death” of 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners to Buchenwald, another death camp. Thousands of prisoners died on this march.
But the United States had delayed entering World War II for at least a year. They were hoping the Nazis and the Soviet Union would weaken each other. So the 42nd and 45th Divisions of the U.S. Army did not get to the Buchenwald concentration camp until April 11, just a few weeks before the Red Army liberated Berlin and ended the war. But the 5,000 prisoners that remained at Buchenwald had organized a rebellion and had killed most of the SS guards. The same thing happened at Dachau when at 9 a.m. on April 29, dozens of prisoners stopped the SS men from eliminating all the inmates by fighting them. It was not until nine hours later, at 6 p.m., that the 42nd and 45th Divisions entered Dachau and joined the fight, which lasted until the early morning of April 30. 30,000 survived the order, issued by Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler’s SS, to kill all the prisoners. But it was the rebelling prisoners that saved these lives. Many more would have been saved if the U. S. had not delayed entering the war.
The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis
Today the capitalist regimes in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, deny that the populations of these lands were “liberated” at all (though Jewish organizations continue to insist that the Red Army were indeed liberators). Everything is being done to excuse the Polish, British, French, and U.S. capitalist rulers, who sabotaged all efforts to stop Hitler. Instead, these capitalist rulers urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union and put a stop to the communist movement, and the socialist Soviet Union, which did everything possible to stop the Nazis and whose troops ultimately beat the fascist scum.
Since capitalism manufactures profit wars where young people are ordered to kill and die to defend the bosses, the Progressive Labor Party’s job is to respond to this horror by winning workers to end capitalist war through communist revolution. Our aim is to win workers to fight the bosses, rather than fight one another. To do this we must lead class struggle and fight back against capitalist ideas within the bosses’ armed forces.
From the Vietnam War to the present, PLP members have been in the bosses’ military and among many struggles we helped win the freedom of a Black anti-war soldier falsely accused of killing two officers in Vietnam. Later we organized support for marines in Camp Pendleton who broke up a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
Uncertain of the potential outcomes, young communists deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and fought cynicism by acting with communist convictions. We won enlisted troops to act against the actions of a racist officer. We aided a wounded Iraqi army soldier that other medics refused to treat. We spoke up when officers belittled and racially harassed the lower enlisted. We expressed our opposition to occupation to close friends while on missions intended to maintain the occupation. We shared Challenge and resisted the U.S. military’s racism against workers abroad.
All these actions impacted working class troops in positive ways. For some, communism became a good thing instead of a bad one. Others became open to the idea of a revolutionary movement. A handful of working-class troops took leadership from our party instead of the command, even if it was only for a few short moments. At least one comrade chose not to use deadly force when the command encouraged it. Workers are the ones who suffer when the bosses send us to war. The only way to make a communist difference on the battlefield is to bring our ideas with us.
Fighting the bosses’ ideas inside the bosses military isn’t easy, though it isn’t necessarily easy anywhere given how hard the bosses fight to keep control of capitalism. We’ve made mistakes of all kinds. But we are always learning and the experiences we’ve gained by fighting against capitalist ideas inside the military has helped keep our Party on the road to communist revolution.
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Book review Denial of history to peddle bourgeois socialism
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- 21 February 2020 65 hits
The cover of Economics professor R. D. Wolff’s latest book, Understanding Socialism features a red rose as a symbol of socialist workers struggles indicating that change can come peacefully. This rejects the historic red flag used worldwide today that symbolized the bloodstained bed sheets carried by workers from their deadly battles against their capitalist oppressors.
Wolff describes the two major anti-socialist purges of the 20th century as European fascism and the U.S.-led post World War II cold war. These were in fact capitalist attempts to prevent further worldwide communist revolutions that had already expropriated enormous property, profits, privileges, and power from capitalists since the 1917 Russian working class revolution and founding of the Soviet (workers’ councils) Union.
FDR and socialists save capitalism
Wolff says that the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s socialism was a harsh, political dictatorship and praises U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) for his “embrace of socialism” during the Great Depression of 1929-41. During that period of international capitalist collapse, the Soviet Union was the only country with full employment and production while in the U.S. tens of millions were unemployed, homeless, hungry, and marching in the streets for revolution. When FDR sent army tanks against workers occupying Ford auto plants, the workers threatened to burn the factories down if one shot was fired at them. Fearing another 1917 revolution, FDR ran to his capitalist bosses and got them to provide the working class with New Deal benefits in exchange for outlawing communist politics in their unions. Socialists supported the capitalists during this economic crisis helping them survive depression and revolution.
The Soviet Union was the world’s first attempt to build a communist society where everyone was needed and no one was left out. It was a society that fought racism and sexism. The Soviet Union never achieved a communist society because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system like wages and privileges. They also lost millions of their most communist workers in WWII when the Soviet Union’s mighty Red Army destroyed 80 percent of the Nazi armies, the world’s most powerful capitalist military, saved Europe from becoming a Nazi colony and showed the power of an organized working class society to the world that still makes capitalism tremble.
Wolff equates communists with dictatorship. He says they oppose democracy and freedom without defining those terms. The present U.S. champions of democracy and freedom have 1,000 military bases in almost 100 countries that support the sanctioning and bombing into submission of any country that resists domination. It would seem that Wolff opposes dictatorship unless it is coming from the capitalist class.
Socialism preserves inequality
Socialism engages in economic and reform struggles, but its essence and practice has been to enable capitalists to hold onto power during economic crisis, wars, and revolutions. Wolff says, “where once socialist parties represented opposition to capitalism, they have become parties advocating a kinder, gentler private capitalism with a mixture of state capitalism.” Wolff says the socialist principle is “from each according to ability, to each according to their work.” Translated into capitalist economics that means managers and professionals can make hundreds or thousands of times what a worker is paid. This explains why socialist China has the most billionaires and why capitalist world inequality exists where one percent own more than 99 percent of the wealth that workers produce.
The communist principle is ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need.’ Translated into communist economics that means those with greater needs like poorer communities, large families or those with medical problems would receive more.
Capitalism’s socialist allies try to prevent the primary source of communist power which is the working class’s understanding and implementation of communist ideas. Communism requires a communist movement and revolutionary struggles led by today’s communist Progressive Labor Party to end capitalism.
