The following is an excerpted speech given by a young woman at the Brooklyn May Day March for Communism.
I am a high school student and I stand in solidarity with the international working class to eradicate this capitalist system, and eventually, fight for worldwide communism.
Capitalism is a system that gets working-class people killed. We are killed from hunger. We are killed by homelessness. We are killed by bombs, drones, and bullets. We are killed by overdose or suicide.
This is not made for me
I have been forced to grow up in a system that was not created for me. Myself and millions of my peers are the future and it is our responsibility to fight for a communist world now because our future is on the line.
Black and Latin high schoolers like me are forced to walk through metal detectors just to enter school, a long-standing culture of the racist policing of youth. The bosses have money for drones and but they underfund our schools. The Department of Education promotes the corrupt elitist specialized high schools, while kids in smaller mostly Black and Latin schools aren’t even given the necessary resources to learn. Students in my building organized a walkout for learning that doesn’t force us to be in front of a computer with no help from teachers. As a result, the computer-based learning was removed. The strength in our movement was our unity.
Unity of the working class is unstoppable, and while winning a small victory seems minimal, it not only showed the bosses that we are unafraid, but it also encourgaed those who believed that is wasn’t worth fighting.
Racist borders
I have a friend who went to a volleyball tournament out of state with her mom. While waiting at a bus stop, ICE, the immigration police, approached them, demanded ID, and detained her! My friend was born here but her mom is undocumented. Imagine how scared my friend was knowing that there was a possibility that she would never see her mother again. We live in a society that separates innocent families who are escaping the very countries the U.S.
government and their capitalist allies and foes have helped to destroy. Nothing but desperation and love for one’s children will cause a parent to make the dangerous journey across a desert, only to risk living in concentration camps or living under the threat of being snatched up like prey. These are the choices under capitalism.
Luckily, my friend knew that she could rely on the working class. She called the director of the volleyball club, who then called on coaches. They all went back to get them. They avoided a disaster at least for now. This is what millions of working people in this country and around the world have to deal with just to try and provide for their families. Politicians can’t solve this problem. It’s up to us to change the world.
Racist police
We live in a society which allows racist police to kill innocent Black men and women. We must remember that every person killed has family who loves them. For Shantel Davis, Kiki Grey, Kyam Livingston, Tyrone West, for too many other names we must continue to fight because their voices were ripped from them by these killer cops. These same cops whose job it is to scare protestors or strikers, to keep the working class in constant fear so that they don’t rebel.
Voting doesn’t work
The bosses infect us with the wrong idea that voting the “bad bosses out” is the way to get this. This false idea that the U.S. was moving in the right direction was enforced when the first Black president was elected. Obama continued to do the dirty work of the men before him. His administration deported more people than any other president, dropped over 12,000 bombs on Syria in his presidency and did nothing to fight racism like many believed he would.
Donald Trump’s open, vicious, anti-immigrant racism is a big attack on our class. Communists reject the bosses’ fake borders, made to keep us divided. Our solidarity knows no boundaries.
We are given “socialist leaders” like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an alternative. But they still want to keep the capitalism in place; the same system that was built on slavery, segregation, and war. Their main job is to fool people into thinking that we have finally found a fix. The rulers are preparing us for a future of war. The U.S. wants us to fight people as young as me in China and Russia.
Fight back
In Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, West Virginia and other cities, teachers, students, and parents went on strike, demanding better learning and working conditions.
Haiti: Tens of thousands rebelled against the government for mispending government funds instead of using it to help lessen poverty.
India: Over 150 million workers took part in a national general strike.
Central America: Workers marched to the border of the U.S. breaking down the illusions of borders along the way, only to be met with pepper spray, beatings and arrests. But other workers showed up in support.
Workers need communism to win
When workers come together we can overcome the elaborate plan that bosses created to oppress us. History has shown that under communist leadership, despite many weaknesses, working-class unity benefits our class.
After the revolution in Cuba, middle class city kids were sent off into rural areas to teach literacy. Kids as young as seven taught people who had never learned to read or write. In 1962, Cuba had one of the highest numbers of literate people in the western hemisphere.
Yet, teens like me are told we shouldn’t be involved because these concepts are too complicated. Still, we continue to be exposed to racism and sexism during early childhood, we are overpoliced in schools, segregated and separated based on our academic performance; that is what we are too young for!
We want a future where children don’t have to deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. That future is communism. We will not tolerate anything but the best for the international working class!
The next U.S. president will inherit the task of maintaining U.S. imperialism’s blood-soaked world leadership. The long-term trends of U.S. imperialist decline and Chinese imperialist ascendancy makes for an ever-more volatile world situation.
The working class is faced with choosing between following one set of bosses or another as they spend our class’ lives killing each other in war for their power and benefit, or the best option building a revolutionary communist movement to smash capitalism once and for all with revolution.
Sooner or later regional war will explode into major war requiring a military draft. The task the bosses will demand of the next U.S. president will be to win over U.S. workers to sacrifice, for U.S. youth to die and to build a mass fascist movement to force the smaller fascist U.S. bosses to fund wider war.
While not the bosses’ first choice, it may turn out that Bernie Sanders ends up as the person the U.S. rulers rely on to do the job. In his most recent foray into foreign policy he sold himself by pointing to Trump’s abrupt pullout from Syria: that Trump’s impulsive unilateral action “left our international partners blindsided and questioning U.S. leadership” (sanders.senate.gov, Jan 2019).
For Sanders, as well as for the most established wing of the U.S. ruling class, preserving the U.S. bosses position in the world is key–everything else comes after that. Sanders’ democratic socialism will spawn a more dangerous imperialism because his strategy of binding the youth more closely to a reformed capitalism is the glue U.S. rulers hope will hold society together in the event of a draft.
Current congressional efforts to discipline Trump over the Saudi war in Yemen have given Bernie the platform to make the case that war ought to be waged with the broad support of the U.S. populace of which congressional approval is symbolic.
Sanders’record: reliable war strategist
Over the years Bernie’s role as the voice for winning workers and students to support war becomes clear– since the 1990s his votes against war have been interspersed with votes to fund war (votesmart.org). He voted to support Clinton’s regime change and sanctions targeted at Iraq in 1998, for the 2001 Authorization of Force resolution that opened the War on Terror and in 2009 voted to keep Guantanamo Bay open. In 2016 Sanders supported Obama’s escalation of U.S. ground forces in Syria (thehill.com 4/26/16).
Sander’s role: winning youth to nationalism and capitalism
The average age of a Sander’s donor is 30 (NYT Feb. 25), a segment of the population who were still kids on September 11, 2001, who have lived with war their entire lives. These youth saw their loved ones thrown out of work after the 2008 financial crisis while war spending expanded and they are disillusioned with U.S. imperialism. U.S. workers over 30 are far more likely to say that the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than to say “[t]here are other countries that are better than the U.S.” but among those under 30, the latter view predominates two to one (Atlantic Magazine, 2/21/19). A military draft cannot be imposed on young people with such a view of the world, but a draft is precisely what will be needed in any war with great-power rivals.
The dean of Harvard’s business school Nitin Noriha put the problem for U.S. rulers bluntly: “We–as a school that has often been associated with business, which is closely associated with capitalism–need to ask ‘what can we do to make sure that society’s trust in capitalism remains strong and can be rebuilt?’” Less than half of people aged 18-29 had a positive view of capitalism in 2018, a 12 percentage point decline in the past two years, and Nohria says that “the school’s largest area of concern remains addressing underlying distrust in the United States’ economic framework.” (Harvard Crimson, 4/3).
Sander’s position is to offer a way for the bosses to win the support of the working class to fascism and war, but it will be expensive for U.S. bosses to live up to the packet of reforms Bernie has put forward. A massive reform program will also require mobilizing millions of workers to fight for it.The possibility of losing control of that kind of movement scares the ruling class and tempers their support for a Sanders victory.
Sanders’ programs are also the basis for mobilizing the working class around the main wing positions of disciplining the ruling class and raising taxes on the capitalists to fund their war. The bosses recognize that a civil war or at least a civil reckoning with the more domestically oriented smaller fascists needs mass support in order for the big main wing fascists to win. The big rulers are hoping Sanders’ programs can suck workers into fighting for the big fascists.
Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden are putting forward discounted, less risky versions of the Sanders program. Kamala Harris and other female candidates embody a strategy of ‘representation’ where identity politics would serve as the glue that binds the nation together in the event of a draft. All agree U.S. bosses leadership in the world is key.
Sander’s foreign policy: mass support for U.S. imperialism
Instead of international terrorism Sanders sees an ‘authoritarian axis’ as the new threat–with Russia’s Vladimir Putin figuring prominently in it (Bernie Sanders, speech at Johns Hopkins University, October 2018). Sanders says if war with Russia ‘becomes necessary’ he is ‘not afraid’ (feelthebern.org). In supporting a tighter arms embargo on China in 2005 and repeatedly railing today against China as the source of U.S workers’ worsening standards of living. Sanders hitches his supporters to a program of U.S. nationalism that serves the interests of U.S. rulers keen on coming out ahead in rivalry with their main foes.
Venezuela reveals the Sanders gambit–pose as anti-war now while building a base for wider war in the future. In tune with mass resentment of U.S. imperialism Bernie has spoken out clearly against military intervention at this time, calling it a mistake. He has called for new elections as the best way to dump Maduro. Sanders is willing to go so far as to remind his listeners of the long list of U.S. interventions in Latin America that have built hostility to U.S. capitalism over generations. Reducing this hostility to U.S. capitalism –not challenging capitalism itself–is what Sanders seeks to achieve. Bernie is in effect saying that recognition of the past misdeeds of the U.S. ruling class is essential to building confidence in this same ruling class’capacity to lead society in the future.The choices confronting our class are following the bosses onto the killing fields around the world or fighting for a worker’s led communist society. Progressive Labor Party’s May Day marches and more represent the ongoing communist confidence that the working class can and must seize power and lead society. Let’s build on the successes of May Day 2019 and make May Day 2020 the best political choice workers can make!
I joined the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) for many reasons. Most importantly it was my shared hatred for the way things are currently governed under the capitalist catastrophe, in combo with the harsh realities of being a Black worker forced to live under this racist system. A woman PL’er introduced me to communist ideas. I began revealing to her things that bothered me about our existence as Black people and how our lives aligned with others around the world, and she helped me realize the ways in which my thought processes aligned with party’s line.
My family has been fighting against police and the racist system since I was a child. Watching my family fight with such frequency has made the police the enemy in my eyes. I can recall memories of waking up with guns in our faces, as the police would kick in my grandmother’s door looking for her sons, my uncles, to lock them up. In addition to my hate for this decaying system and its KKKOPS, there was always this sense of disbelief that stirred in me whenever I listened to politicians talking.
I watched how Demopublicans or Republicrats, whichever party they claim to be, don’t really care about you and me. Yet they terrorize and deprive, working people, especially Black workers of the basic rights they claim to protect.
I would alway laugh at their promises of equality, and justice. It was this and my experiences of being a Black man in the U.S., as well as observing the experiences of my working class brothers and sisters that uncovered these lies to me early on in life.
When I returned to Puerto Rico in April with the brigade of comrades from New York and New Jersey to affirm our solidarity with the island’s residents, I was able to see my values put in practice. There were six of us from the original 25 members of last year’s summer project. We revisited the school in Toa Baja and found out that the school had been reopened because of petition efforts by the local parents and teacher organizations. To see parents, teachers, and workers from the community defy the island bosses, occupy the school, and turn it into a community center was supremely powerful for me to witness. It makes me want to get more involved! It showed me that like Black workers, Puerto Rican workers have a resiliency and determination that I admire. They keep fighting no matter how hard they get knocked down.
To be able to do this type of work has developed my awareness of class-consciousness;the same things they are doing to you, they are doing to me. We are in the same class and if we struggle together we can win.
Moreover, my newfound camaraderie with PLP members helped shape my creative process as a film-maker/documentarian, such that it enabled me to use my craft as a vessel for communicating anti-racist and communist values.
PLP gave me a whole new perspective for understanding the world, and the way capitalism is constantly contorting, shape-shifting and creating new ways to distort our reality, and create unnatural divisions amongst workers. Best of all, the most exciting part of being a communist is the way it makes me feel, more alive as opposed to just living or existing. Looking back I always felt like communism was natural to me.
I decided to commit to communism and join the Progressive Labor Party because it was the right thing to do—the progressive thing to do for my family, friends, community, and the earth.
These are loose stats but it feels as though one out of two people I talk to are workers who are tired of working, exhausted by capitalism, not having insurance and drinking Robitussin and other homemade remedies for their colds and ailments because they can’t afford to go pay for prescribed medicine.
I’m done with being super-exploited as a Black, queer woman and disgusted with U.S. imperialism and the effects that war and greed has on the Earth’s land and atmosphere. I’m done with knowing that we should do better and not acting.
I joined because from Puerto Rico to Jersey, there are food deserts leaving workers stranded with little to no healthy food options or food that’s not injected with hormones and making them sick.
I joined because my mother has been on disability for the last 20 years, making a little under $2,000 a month. She’s had a looming cloud of fear to even go back to her former place of employment, the Post Office, because of her past trauma of being treated like a slave as a mail carrier. I joined because of my father sacrificing his spirit, wasting away emotionally and physically as a NJTransit Bus Driver, working day to night and overworking on his days off and on vacation to provide for my mother and I. Working is the center of his world. The center of his next world is retirement and moving down to a Southern state.
However, more of us want the center of our next world to be different—to not revolve around a potential reward of resting and a pension in exchange for 60 years of labor. Sixty years of not connecting with your family, isolating yourself from your community and only being able to help those closest to you. Sixty years of back and neck injuries, temper flares, trauma, alcoholism and depression.
I joined because my brother, cousin, best friend and many others that I know in Newark and in other parts of New Jersey are limited to low wage jobs at the Post Office, UPS, Amazon and the Newark Airport as their options. The youth know that retirement and a pension is not guaranteed in 40 years. That is no longer a reality for many of us; we don’t stay at one job for 40 years but work pay-check to pay-check, working up to five jobs at the same time. I am no longer okay with knowing better and not doing better.
I joined because I’m fed up with reformism and respectability politics and shaming the poor, working class on whether they vote or not. I’m tired of police brutality and innocent people dying in prisons, I’m tired of street harassment and microagressions in the work place.
The Progressive Labor Party is passionate and direct about what our struggles are and what we need to do to win and defeat capitalism.
PLP is about struggling, growing, caring for each other and equally critiquing others and ourselves on how to be better for the sake of the world. PLP meets people where they are at and connects our personal problems to a bigger picture of how capitalism is destroying us all. But instead of taking on the problems of capitalism by ourselves or complaining about or making a meme about it here and there, PLP challenges us to work together and destroy capitalism instead.
I’m here for it, I’m dedicated to it and I’m hopeful for the future and the solutions that we put into practice. We know the problems, now let’s connect and build towards a new center and a better world. Long live PLP! Long live communism!
BOSTON, MA, April 29–On April 11, Stop & Shop workers at 240 stores went on strike in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in the first grocery workers’ strike in 15 years at the only unionized supermarket chain in New England. Strikers said NO to low wages, attacks on pension plans, ending overtime pay for Sundays and holidays, drastic cuts to health care plans, and reduced hours for part-time workers. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends walked picket lines at half a dozen stores in Boston and Worcester, urging other workers to support the strike and calling for an end to the capitalist profit system.
This strike was a heroic attack on a huge capitalist company and adds to the encouraging rise of strikes in the U.S. It was nearly 100 percent solid and strongly supported by customers. Stop & Shop lost $100 million during the 11-day strike, 75 percent of their business. Worker solidarity beat back many company attacks, but workers still remain at semi-starvation wages.
The enemy is capitalism
Stop & Shop is owned by Ahold Delhaize (owner of Food Lion, Hannaford, Martin’s, among others), a Dutch corporation with 375,000 employees and stores in 11 countries. Ahold made a $2 billion profit last year, and is valued at $23 billion. This is an example of what Karl Marx called “consolidation of capital”—big companies gobble up smaller companies in order to cut costs, and stay competitive against their rivals. This law of capitalist economics can’t be changed through laws and regulations, or by working for “better” companies. The profit Stop & Shop made last year averages $6,000 per worker. In other words, each worker loses 1/4 of their pay to profit the company. Imagine, giving up 1/4 of your (already low) paycheck to make wealthy shareholders even richer –and it’s all legal under capitalism! That’s why we need a revolutionary change to a system of communism, where workers run society and profits and exploitation are illegal.
Undemocratic union sold out part-time workers
A Stop & Shop worker in Worcester, MA said workers at her store are angry: “We went on strike for all the workers. But there are no union meetings, and part-time workers got almost nothing.” Union leaders told workers to go back to work before they even saw or had a chance to vote on the new contract. Seventy-five percent of Stop & Shop workers are part-time, and their average pay averages $12.75/hour. Many who work 30 hours a week have no health or retirement benefits. Many part-time workers had their hours cut in the last few months, with no promise of getting their old hours back. The lowest-paid workers got only a 25-cent raise. The worst part of the contract is the “two-tier” system: new hires get lower wages, pensions, and benefits than current workers, dividing them from the better-paid full-time and longer-serving workers.
Striker’s fight inspired other workers
The strikers faced a tough battle as Stop & Shop kept some stores open using management as scabs. The company also used workers from prison-release programs as scabs, at much higher pay than most employees! The strikers weren’t allowed to even talk with workers, such as security, who are not part of the union, making it harder to spread the strike. The police sided with the company, not letting strikers at some stores block driveways to keep shoppers from crossing the picket line. And the union, United Food and Commercial Workers, only gave $100 a week in strike benefits.
Strike support spread
Many workers from other trades supported this strike. Teamsters, or truck drivers refused to make food deliveries. At one picket line, 25 members of the steelworkers union–some recently locked out by gas company NSTAR for demanding a labor contract–showed up and militantly confronted shoppers. Members of other unions (teachers, electrical and construction workers) also walked the picket lines. PLP members visited picket lines, and gave out strike support leaflets in English and Spanish and CHALLENGE newspapers. Politicians such as Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren showed up, hoping for votes, but it was working class solidarity that won the day, bringing strikes as workers’ strongest weapon back into the consciousness of the working class of New England.
Let’s also bring the ideas of workers’ power and communist revolution into the consciousness of workers everywhere.
