In 1926, a communist-led 17-week strike of 12,000 New York City fur workers fought and won significant reforms beating back the bosses’ association, the cops, Mafia gangsters, thugs, and the reactionary International union leadership. They were led by Ben Gold, a member of the Communist Party and leader of the union’s N.Y. Joint Board. The very next year the fur industry bosses were disregarding the gains won by the workers. Gold had to organize the workers to strike again. They did and they won again.
Gold went on to organize many more strikes. Many of them were successful. So the workers won the 40-hour, five-day workweek, a 10 percent raise, 10 paid holidays and more. Then they went on strike again and again to maintain their gains. Today workers around the world are still protesting and striking for a decent life. However it is only when the international working class organizes to take power and destroy capitalism with communist revolution, that we can finally free ourselves from this capitalist nightmare.
It all started on January 23, when over 6000 workers attended a mass union meeting and authorized a strike. The head of the bosses’ association, called these demands a “conspiracy” to “Bolshevize” (spread communist ideas in) the fur industry. At a January 30 mass meeting Gold declared, “All the forces of the union must be concentrated for this effort.” A sea of hands went up to volunteer for a General Picketing Committee.” The bosses urged workers to reject their leadership and defeat the “Communist conspiracy.” Instead, the workers voted by over 90 percent to authorize a strike. This was a good time to talk about a government totally controlled by the capitalists. A government that would violently attack the workers. A government that had to be overthrown by a communist-led working class. Instead the communists were running and even winning elections for some low-level government positions.
Mass picketing beats back
scabs, gangsters, cops
The strike began on Feb. 16. The General Picketing Committee of 1,000 kept out scabs and strikebreakers. The strike was an historic struggle by U.S. workers. On the following Monday, 10,000 strikers marched through the fur district. The cops charged, but the workers maintained solid ranks, beating back the police, scabs and hired thugs. The cops repeated their attacks on every march. But the unity of these communist-led, Jewish, Black and Greek, women and men workers was unshakeable. When hired Mafia thugs attacked the strike hall, hundreds of strikers overwhelmed them, stripping them of their guns, blackjacks, knives and clubs as they fled. After several weeks of such battles, no gang was willing to attack.
Many bosses now faced bankruptcy and were ready to grant the union’s demands. But the sellout International union officers were meeting secretly with the bosses to betray the workers and to stop the rising influence of the communist-led New York union. Gold and the General Strike Committee urged workers to go to a union meeting at Carnegie Hall and tell the sellouts: “Hands off our strike! Get out of the way!” When workers learned that Ben Gold had been barred from the meeting, they began chanting, “We want Gold!” The four union sellouts gave up and left. The workers went wild. Gold told the strikers: “This meeting … proves that the fur strikers are fighting...for the cause of organized labor in America…All this wealth we, the workers, created ….” The workers carried Gold out of the hall on their shoulders. This event demonstrated that the working class can understand communist ideas and will defend communist leaders.
Mass picketing intensified, as did police attacks. One arrested striker wrote to the General Strike Committee: “… do not spend any money in trying to obtain my release.... the money is necessary for more important matters... I hope that when I come back, I will find...a great victory.”
On May 17, the General Strike Committee called for a giant rally in Madison Square Garden. Support wires came from across the U.S. But the union was broke and needed at least $50,000 to cover strike relief. In one of the greatest acts of sharing in U.S. labor history, more than $100,000 was raised. On June 11, at 3:00 a.m. the strike was settled. The workers won significant reforms.
The communist-led, largely immigrant furriers’ union was a beacon to the U.S. working class. Over two decades, they would beat down Mafia goons; confront the Nazi Bund in the streets of New York; fight in the Spanish Civil War and donate trucks and ambulances to the anti-fascist fighters. They provided security for Paul Robeson’s Peekskill concerts that were attacked in 1949 by racist, anti-communist mobs. But the Communist Party did not call on these heroic workers to organize a revolutionary movement to overthrow the capitalist class and build a communist society run by the working class.
Thousands of fur and garment workers joined the old Communist Party, and for some time, had some vision of overthrowing capitalism and building a communist future. But that vision was clouded and eventually buried as the Communist Party gave up the fight for revolution. Today it is our task in the Progressive Labor Party, to have confidence in the working class to join us in the fight for a communist world.
The history of South America’s Pink Tide exposes the sham of capitalist reform as a solution for the international working class. The track record of recently ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales is the latest proof. Workers in Bolivia have never run society; they control nothing. Before, during, and after Morales, the capitalist bosses have kept their iron grip on the Bolivian economy, courts, legislature, police, and army. Under the murderous profit system, the state serves the capitalist ruling class, first and last.
Only a communist revolution can create real power for workers to run all aspects of society, to create a world based on anti-racism and anti-sexism, and to fulfill the needs of the international working class.
Though workers in Bolivia have taken to the streets in militant mass protests, their militancy is being wasted on two anti-working class options. On one side is the Morales camp, backed by Russian and Chinese imperialists. On the other is new president Jeanine Anez, a far-right evangelical Christian whose interim government appointed the first Bolivian ambassador to the U.S. since 2008. Both sides are rotten and lethal.
We call on all workers to reject the dead end of indigenous nationalist identity politics, which kept Morales in power for 13 years. Identity politics fractures and disarms our class and prevents class-conscious solidarity. When we view ourselves as inherently different or opposed to other groups of workers, we are doing the bosses’ work. A revolutionary communist movement unites workers against the root cause of racism: the bosses’ drive for maximum profit.
Pink Tide is not workers’ power
Before Morales, Bolivia had an apartheid-like society that exploited, impoverished, and marginalized indigenous workers. As the country’s first indigenous president, Morales used his Movement for Socialism (MAS) to exploit workers as a power base. He paid them with crumbs: low-level government jobs, an indigenous flag, and a reduction in “extreme” poverty. But as Morales fled to exile in Mexico, Bolivia still has one of the highest poverty rates in South America at 39 percent (Borgen Project).
While cutting deals with foreign bosses, Morales nationalized the petrochemical industries. He funneled money to favored local capitalists and distributed proceeds from exports to buy votes. He allowed the mining industry to encroach on indigenous lands. To consolidate his power base, Morales also spent billions on infrastructure, access to healthcare, and education reform.
But capitalist reforms are always temporary. Just as in Venezuela, the falling global price of oil cut into Bolivia’s revenues. Squeezed for cash, Morales betrayed his promises to protect indigenous lands and the people who live on them. In 2017, he broke his word and approved the construction of a 190-mile highway through a national park in the Amazon:
The highway, Morales argued, was necessary to bring basic services to remote tribes. But native groups and environmentalists were enraged:
The road... would facilitate drug trafficking, illegal logging and other unwanted activity. Protesters marched for more than a month, during which police and demonstrators clashed in clouds of tear gas and flurries of rubber bullets (Reuters, 8/24/18).
Neither identity politics nor fake-left democratic “socialism” will liberate our class. We must understand that the fight for a just world is intertwined with the larger struggle to destroy capitalism.
Imperialism is the name of the game
For some years now, as U.S. imperialism declines and retreats, Chinese and Russian imperialists have moved into Bolivia to fill the vacuum. This competition is a lose-lose proposition for the working class in Bolivia. No matter which superpower takes charge, workers will be left at the mercy of the bosses’ capitalist system.
The president before Morales, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, went too far in “restructuring” the Bolivian economy to suit the interests of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund. He pushed for tax increases and other austerity measures that triggered mass unrest and ultimately forced his resignation. As a former coca grower, union leader, and leading member of Lozada’s opposition, Morales exploited anti-U.S. mass anger to get elected.
Soon after Morales took power, Russian companies began investing heavily in Bolivia. Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear monopoly, got a contract to build a $300 million nuclear center near La Paz, the Bolivian capital, and began negotiating a concession to develop Bolivia’s large lithium reserves. Gazprom PJSC, the Russian state-controlled natural gas company, has been in Bolivia since 2010 (Bloomberg Opinion, 11/11). The Chinese imperialists also came calling: “Between 2000 and 2014, bilateral trade between Bolivia and China increased nearly 3,000 percent, from $75.3 million to $2.25 billion...” (COHA, 8/31).
The finance capital, main wing of the U.S. ruling class (aka the Big Fascists) sees Morales’ ouster as a chance to regain some of its lost imperialist influence in Latin America. It’s seeking to support a pro-U.S. president who could stem the Russian and Chinese bosses’ growing presence in the region. Anez is auditioning for the job.
At the same time, U.S. rulers are worried about the recent wave of mass protests across Latin America. The liberal main wing bosses stand for a more disciplined ruling class—a hallmark of fascism—and a more regulated, less openly greedy brand of capitalism. The flagrant inequality in countries like Bolivia is not sustainable. In Chile, meanwhile, the working class exploded over a four-cent transit fare hike. The main wing U.S. bosses understand that they and their South American allies can’t continue to rule in the old way.
The capitalist profit system exists solely for the enrichment of a few off of the backs of the masses. Any gains made by working class reform struggles are always taken back. Workers cannot rely on identity politics or the bosses’ elections to fix this inherently racist, sexist, unequal system. Left-sounding rhetoric by stooges like Morales can’t change the basic conflict between bosses and workers. Only a society run by workers and for workers can bring our class the anti-racist, anti-sexist equality we deserve. Join Progressive Labor Party!
CHICAGO, November 20—A multiracial group of protestors took the streets of downtown Chicago this evening to attack a racist, anti-immigrant worker non-profit organization. For the second year in a row, anti-racist fighters blocked the entrances of the luxurious Swissotel on Wacker Drive, where Heartland Alliance was hosting their annual fundraising gala.
Although liberal politicians like to paint themselves as the saviors of immigrants, and the working class in general, their history of fascist collaboration with agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and mass deportations shows a deadlier reality.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and friends took part in this action, which enabled us to expose the liberal wing of the capitalist ruling class as the greater long-term threat to our class. Our goal is to win workers to break entirely with capitalist politricks in favor of joining a mass international PLP that smashes all borders with communist revolution!
Hold the antiracist line
Before the gala even began, there was already a sizable group of anti-racist fighters lined up on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. There were signs and banners that called out Heartland Alliance’s racist profiteering off of the detention of immigrant working-class youth. Some of the protestors were even dressed in elegant gowns and suits while wearing grotesque masks as a way to mock Heartland’s donors.
As the gala’s attendees started trying to pull in to the driveway in front of the hotel, they were met with a human chain of protestors blocking their entrance. Although the hotel security was able to sneak in a few vehicles, there were a number of vehicles that were turned away entirely as we refused to break the line.
Once we had reached a critical mass in our numbers, we cranked up the militancy and took over nearby Wacker Drive during rush hour traffic. Both lanes of the street were blocked, as protestors held a long banner that read “Heartland Loves ICE: Imprisoning Children for Profit.” All the while, there were speakers on the bullhorn explaining Heartland’s connections to capitalism’s deportation machine and chants of “Heartland Alliance, jails kids for money!” and “Heartland donors, shame on you!”
Sure enough, it wasn’t long after blocking one of the busiest streets in the city’s wealthiest area that the bosses saw it necessary to call in their guard dogs of the Chicago Police Department (CPD).The racists-in-blue immediately started threatening arrests while trying to box in the anti-racist fighters with their patrol bicycles. Despite their threats, we refused to back down easily, holding the street for close to twenty more minutes before finally getting pushed onto the sidewalk.
This more militant action was a bold and necessary step. Many of the demonstrations organized in support of immigrant workers and refugees are limited by the liberal misleaders containing us, both physically and politically. To truly advance the mass movement, we need to be ready to break with the bosses’ laws as well as their misleadership in favor of revolutionary militancy backed up by communist politics and organization.
Heartland and liberals: guilty as hell
Heartland Alliance is definitely a worthy target of working-class rage. Since 2013, the organization has received more than $180 million from the federal government to house children around Chicago, making it one of the five largest detention operators in the United States. They mandate that any sponsor looking to gain custody of a detained youth give fingerprints and other information to databases that ICE then uses to track and terrorize immigrant workers (Chicago Reader, 11/27). They were forced to shut down four of their facilities in the surrounding suburbs after complaints surfaced about mistreatment and even sexual abuse of youth (ProPublica Illinois, 3/13).
However, Heartland Alliance is only another liberal symptom of the larger capitalist disease. The liberal, more-dominant wing of the U.S. capitalist ruling class likes to rail against injustice and violence against immigrant workers, but only for their own political and economic profit. They cry fake tears about immigrant children being separated from their parents, but conveniently forget that many of the prisons where the children are held were built under Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama’s watch. They all back the capitalist profit system at the end of the day, the same system that uses borders, racism and imperialism to divide, oppress and exploit all workers.
Abolish borders with communist revolution
To guarantee liberation for the international working class, we need to reject all forms of fascism, whether it be the domestic Small Fascists represented by Donald Trump and his ilk, or the international Big Fascists, fronted by the various stooges in the Democratic Party. The abolition of borders does not and will never come from voting, but only by building a mass international communist movement.
PLP represents the seeds of that movement, which will bury capitalism, racism, deportations, and exploitation for good. Join us and fight for a borderless, worker-run world.
LOS ANGELES, December 4—“How do you spell racist, LAPD!” Every night for 14 nights straight, antiracists marched to the Newtown Police Station to demand answers for the murder of 34-year-old Latin worker Alex Flores.
The family, friends, residents, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been protesting against the two thugs from the biggest gang in Los Angeles (the LAPD). The mainly Latin workers have rallied, marched, shut down streets, pounded on, and spray painted the doors of the local police station. The cowardly cops have locked the doors, infuriating the protestors, but the cops cannot escape the anger of the working class.
This fight is greater than just Alex. Justice for Alex means fighting for a world where innocent young men and women of the working class will no longer be gunned down by police. It means fighting for a communist world because no politician (no matter how liberal), court, or settlement can erase the racist system that gave birth to this heinous act.
“Policia, cochina, racista y asesina”
PLP has distributed CHALLENGE and is working with the family and fighters to launch an organizing committee for Alex. PLP is also helping build multiracial unity by mobilizing friends from mass organizations including teachers, students, the church, and more. The most threatening thing to the bosses and their system, aside from communist revolution, is multiracial unity.
This fight provides the opportunity to expose the racist nature of the whole system. Under this racist, capitalist system that we live in, the police serve the bosses and protect their property and profits at the point of a gun. Only a communist revolution can rid the world of this racist terror and the rulers who are behind it.
“Queremos justicia”
As usual, the local bosses’ media report on the killing mouthed the lies told by the cops: a shirtless man, who had wielded a knife, confronted the police. However, cellphone video taken by a resident clearly shows Alex moving sideways and away from where the two kkkillers stood as they pointed their guns at him. Regardless of Alex’s alleged offense, the police committed an act of murder. The capitalist media focused on calling this mini rebellion a mob. This goes to show which side of the fight the media is on.
Alex, working-class brother
Alex is our working-class brother. His father, who has helped lead the fightback against the killing, had emigrated to the U.S. from the Mexican state of Guerrero in the 1970s. His father worked in the garment industry in Los Angeles for 30 years. His parents raised him and his siblings in this South LA neighborhood.
Alex was known as a caring, patient, family-oriented man who was great with kids. As with many disproportionately Black and Latin workers, he was also a victim of mass racist unemployment, a product of the capitalist system. Like his girlfriend told us, the bosses’ system “didn’t give him a chance.” Capitalism sets up most of us to fail. Then, it blames us for the failure. (See box for more about Alex on page 8).
Justice = fight for communism
The working class is leading this fight. Should it grow, it will be exposed to many parasitic elements—pacifiers, provocateurs, misleaders, politicians, and reformists. To counteract the fight from becoming cynical or coopted by liberal misleaders, workers must challenge the whole system through communist ideas. It is up to PLP to bring an international class-conscious outlook to these antiracist fighters. PLP will continue fighting alongside the antiracists and building a base for communism. The positive response of workers in this community to PLP’s politics is a sign of a bright communist, antiracist future for our class.
HARLEM, November 22—In a follow-up to the march on November 1 in Brooklyn (see 11/20 issue), over a thousand protesters marched in Harlem to call out the New York Police Department’s racist policing tactics within the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The event was called without permit and the kkkops came out in force in an effort to intimate the antiracists. Nonetheless, protestors bravely took over the streets repeatedly with chants such as “How do you spell racist? NYPD!”
Racism is part of the ride
The MTA is revving up its anti-working class and racist fare-evasion crackdown efforts. This essentially translates into more racist profiling and police terror in the transit system. The crimes of these cops include handcuffing a woman worker selling churros, punching teenagers, arresting candy sellers, and pulling guns on suspected fare-evaders. In addition to this, Governor Andrew Cuomo plans to ratchet up the presence of cops (by 500!) in the subway by next year.
Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the protest and distributed hundreds of CHALLENGE newspapers. Some young marchers, frustrated with the capitalist system and liberal politicians like Mayor De Blasio who help carry out racist attacks on Black and Latin workers, received the newspaper with enthusiasm. The working class in Harlem were also interested in our message, and many joined the march or chants as it passed by.
Police come from slave patrols and the Klan
One political weakness of the mass march is evident in its main slogan, “f*ck the police.” This line from N.W.A.’s 1988 song suggests individual terrorism and violence against individual police as the answer.
The problem at hand is a systematic one. In the United States, the institution of the police is rooted in the slave system. Much like how Cuomo’s cops will patrol the subways, slaveowners hired men to patrol for runaway enslaved workers. The patrollers protected property and sought out unsanctioned gatherings and any signs of potential revolt. Later the patrols were replaced by the likes of the Ku Klux Klan.
While slavery was abolished, it has been replaced by wage slavery. While the legally sanctioned slave patrollers are gone, they have been replaced by the terror squad of the government, the NYPD. To get rid of the police system, we must attack it at its root—capitalism and its need to exploit workers as well as suppress any potential revolts. Only an organized communist organization has the means to get rid of capitalism, and that means revolution.
Cops attack
The evening was also marked by attacks from police on the protest. Marchers successfully took the streets and even blocked a bridge to the Bronx. The police arrested dozens. At times, they rushed the crowd and tackled protesters to the pavement. The following day, many rallied at the city jail to support those arrested.
While the capitalists may use their control of state power to attack and brutalize our class, PLP knows we can ultimately win by mobilizing workers, students, and soldiers to tear this whole system down with communist revolution.
