DRC crisis worsens

Al Jazeera, 3/29–War is on the doorstep of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) Goma city and the region is at breaking point, activists and aid workers have said, as the United Nations sounds an alarm over the situation in the Central African country. “One Congolese person out of four faces hunger and malnutrition,” Bintou Keita, the head of the UN’s DRC peacekeeping mission MONUSCO, told the UN Security Council this week, warning of a rapidly deteriorating security situation and a humanitarian crisis reaching near catastrophic levels.
“More than 7.1 million people have been displaced in the country. That is 800,000 people more since my last briefing three months ago,” she said. Heavy fighting between the Congolese army and armed group M23 has intensified in the eastern part of the country since February…
Haiti crisis worsens as well
Washington Post, 4/5–Heavily armed gangs control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the United Nations has estimated,...Haiti doesn’t manufacture firearms, and the U.N. prohibits importing them, but…When they go shopping, the United States is their gun store. William O’Neill, the U.N.’s independent expert on human rights in Haiti, called conditions here “cataclysmic.” The presidency is vacant; the prime minister has announced his intention to resign; the National Assembly has gone home. 
Nearly 85 percent of guns found at crime scenes in Haiti…in 2021...were traced to the United States. In the Bahamas in 2022, that figure was 98 percent.
…authorities have noted a “marked uptick” in the number and size of guns smuggled into Haiti… .50-caliber sniper rifles, a belt-fed machine gun, and a cache of other high-powered weapons bound for Haiti in 2022,...Traffickers are taking advantage of Miami’s “break-bulk” port, a miles-long stretch of the Miami River lined with freighters that carry cargo…

IDF targets medical workers

The Guardian, 4/7–Professor Nick Maynard was operating on a patient with abdomen and chest bomb injuries when an Israeli missile struck the al-Aqsa hospital’s intensive care unit in the adjacent building, forcing his medical emergency team to withdraw from Gaza days earlier than scheduled. “I’ve witnessed with my own eyes an attack by the Israel Defense Forces on the intensive care unit there,” said Maynard, who works as a surgeon in Oxford and has been traveling to Gaza since 2010.
Aid and health workers account for at least 700 of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to the UN and the Palestinian health ministry. Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only 10 are partly functioning, according to the World Health Organization. “systematically” uses hospitals and medical centres to conduct terror activities.
…The UN condemned the destruction and killing at the hospital, with health workers and patients among those reportedly killed. “At this point, we are no longer discussing availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of healthcare received in dignity, but the annihilation of any infrastructure capable of providing basic first aid,” the UN human rights office said.

Asian Pacific alliance prepares for war with China

France24, 4/7–Beijing's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command said it was organizing "joint naval and air combat patrols in the South China Sea". "All military activities that mess up the situation in the South China Sea and create hotspots are under control,"  it said in a statement, in an apparent swipe at the other drills being held in the waters. Top US officials have repeatedly declared the United States' "ironclad" commitment to defending the Philippines against an armed attack in the South China Sea…
…drills conducted Sunday by the Philippines, United States, Japan and Australia are intended to "(ensure) that all countries are free to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows," US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a joint statement. Talks between the Philippines and Japan for a defence pact that would allow the countries to deploy troops on each other's territory were "still ongoing", a spokesman for the Philippine foreign affairs department told reporters last week. Manila already has a similar agreement with Australia and the United States.

The latest eruption of anti-worker violence in Haiti is yet another reminder of the utter failure and decline of U.S. imperialism. Amid divisions among Haiti’s local bosses, and with the U.S. rulers preoccupied by a war in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in Gaza, armed gangs are fighting viciously for their piece of the capitalist pie. As families flee for their lives, the gangs are waging pitched battles with the national police and now control most of the capital, Port-au-Prince. State institutions are broken. Water and sewage systems have collapsed. Nearly half Haiti’s 11.7 million are suffering from hunger. More than 360,000 workers and children are internal refugees (msn.com, 3/21).
This deadly chaos is more proof that the international working class has no stake in the profit system. The working class—youth, workers, and comrades of Progressive Labor Party—need international solidarity from our class sisters and brothers now! Only communist revolution can liberate workers in Haiti and worldwide from the profit-driven violence of the capitalist bosses. Only communism can stand to meet workers’ basic needs and give our children a healthy future.  

Gangsters big and small

The gangs in Haiti are not merely workers gone rogue. Many are trained ex-operatives or ex-cops seeking to dominate the country for whatever share of the pie they can grab. The state of anarchy in Haiti forced the U.S. imperialists to oust the widely-hated Ariel Henry, the acting president and prime minister whom they’d backed since 2021, when Haiti’s last elected president, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated. Henry’s tenure was viewed as illegitimate by Haiti’s traditional elite, which also saw Moise’s election as the result of manipulation and outright fraud by the administration of the U.S. President Barack Obama.

At the time of Henry’s ouster, he was returning from Kenya, where he’d signed an agreement on a “security” deal with the U.S., France, and Canada to bring in a thousand notoriously violent cops from Kenya to “tame” the gangs in Haiti (CNN, 3/22). But it was already too late for Henry. On March 5, when his plane was to land in the Dominican Republic, the gangs had shut down the airports. Henry’s plane was diverted to Puerto Rico, where his U.S. imperialist masters forced him to resign. They established a new transitional council and packed it with some of their favorite thieves and gangsters. 

The use of gangs to terrorize and torture the working class in Haiti can be traced back to the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century, and to the subsequent thirty-year reign of the murderous “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. With open U.S. support, the Duvaliers terrorized the workers in Haiti with their paramilitary, the infamous Tonton Macoutes. In 1994, years after Baby Doc was overthrown, the U.S. once again invaded the country to restore capitalist order by reinstalling their puppet, the fake leftist Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 2004, they returned as part of a “peacekeeping” force to put down a militia revolt. All the while, the U.S. imperialists collaborated with gangs with close ties to the old Duvalier regime and the Tonton Macoutes.

As workers continue to be terrorized with rape, kidnappings, and murders, there is no “fix” for Haiti under capitalism. The U.S. imperialists have only racist contempt for workers and youth who live one step away from death, with limited or no access to electricity, safe drinking water, sanitation, health care, or housing. The U.S. bosses have already justified their next invasion under the guise of restoring democracy and ridding the country of gangs. But their real concern is that the crisis could result in a flood of hundreds of thousands of Haitian workers into the U.S. in an election year. They also fear that it could destabilize the Caribbean and give China and Russia, their imperialist rivals, an opportunity to make inroads in the region at their expense. Meanwhile, the racist bosses in the Dominican Republic are working with vigilantes to violently expel Haitians seeking refuge. Taking a page from the ethnic cleansers in Israel and the U.S., President Luis Abinader is building to keep Haitian workers out. 

The working class is not taking these capitalist atrocities lying down. In neighborhoods under the small gangsters’ brutal control, workers have united in groups like Bwa Kale. They are turning the guns around, attacking and killing known gang members. But these rebellions pose a threat to the biggest gangsters of all, the U.S. imperialists.  Well aware of the long history of anti-imperialist class hatred in Haiti, which could turn a direct intervention into a bloody debacle, the U.S. bosses went to the United Nations for troops to quell violence against the gangs. Genocide Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are basically outsourcing their next invasion of Haiti to Kenya and other African countries. As in Gaza, the imperialist rulers are determined to prevent embattled workers in Haiti from joining in mass rebellion. But the bosses have one big problem: Workers always fight back!

Workers in Haiti need solidarity & communism!

As ruling-class organizations call for “charity” for Haiti, Progressive Labor Party calls for working-class solidarity and internationalism among our members and friends–and for communist revolution.  Nationalist liberation struggles only replace one set of bosses with another; they can never solve the problems of the international working class.

In 1804, when workers in Haiti won their violent rebellion against their French enslavers, they became a beacon of inspiration for enslaved workers everywhere. Enslavers around the world shook in their boots. But where chattel slavery has been abolished, capitalist wage slavery has taken its place. Now workers need to take the next step, to a society run by and for workers–to communism.

Under communism, profits, and money will be eliminated, along with the capitalist parasites who steal the fruits of our labor. Freed from the bosses’ terror and exploitation, workers in Haiti will help create a new society to serve our class’s needs. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!

LENNOX, CA, March 9—Tenants here, organized by the Lennox/Inglewood Tenants’ Union (LITU), are on the move! Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members active in LITU have recently pushed the organization to make its focus on bringing more rank-and-file tenants into action and leadership. At one apartment complex in Lennox, several immigrant women tenants are showing solidarity with their fellow working-class tenants who are under attack, and giving leadership to the class struggle against evictions and lousy living conditions.
PLP fights for a world without borders and nation-states. Capitalism pushes nationalist ideas to mobilize workers to be loyal to, and fight on the side of, whichever group of bosses runs the nation-state workers happen to live in. Unlike capitalist ideas like nationalism, communist ideas promote working-class solidarity and internationalism.

When workers are convinced that “an attack on one worker is an attack on all workers” class-loyalty emerges. When class consciousness extends to masses of workers all over the world, regardless of where they happen to live, the bosses' days will be numbered!

Tenants fight back together against landlord’s abuses

Nic Murillo, the owner of the apartment complex, is notorious for his in-your-face refusal to spend any money on basic maintenance for the mainly immigrant tenants. When this sleazy slumlord brought court eviction actions against two of the tenant families, LITU sprang into action. LITU organizers canvassed the complex calling for a tenants’ meeting. There, a discussion took place about why “an attack on one is an attack on all” and why all tenants needed to show solidarity and support by going to court with the tenants facing eviction.

As a result, several tenants, together with LITU and other supporters, joined the two tenants. LITU led a rally outside the court, with photos on signs exposing the rotten conditions in tenants’ apartments and calling for unity of all working-class tenants to fight back. The photos pictured bed bug bites on the young daughter of one tenant, and damage to her bedroom floor caused by a leaky roof. That tenant was forced to spend thousands of dollars of her own money to repair the floor when profit-hungry Murillo refused to do so.

Tenants sat together as a group inside the courtroom and rose together when their fellow tenant’s case was called by the court. The lawyer for one of the tenants took a strong stand, telling the judge that she was ready to proceed with a trial that she said would last at least a week and that she intended to call seven witnesses to testify about the unlivable conditions in that tenant’s apartment. She also told Murillo’s attorney that she was ready to demand that the court greatly reduce the rent owed because of the slum conditions.

When Murillo’s attorney saw the supporters in the courtroom, he knew the tenant’s attorney was not bluffing. Shook by this display of class solidarity, Murillo decided to postpone the case for a month. We later found out that one of the eviction cases they brought was dismissed. 
This past Saturday, LITU held a general meeting in the courtyard of the tenants’ apartment complex. Nineteen tenants attended, including seven from the complex. The two tenants facing eviction reported to the group. They described in detail what happened, and emphasized the key role that the support of tenants from that building and others had played.

Tenants endorse international solidarity

At the suggestion of a PLP member, the LITU leadership group agreed that a resolution in solidarity with, and condemning the genocide of, Palestinians in Gaza should be presented to the general meeting. The resolution denounced the Israeli apartheid policy in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the October 7th murderous Hamas assault on Israeli civilians. The resolution connected the history of mass evictions in the West Bank by the brutal Zionist regime in Israel to gentrification and evictions in the Los Angeles area by landlords looking to get around rent control. The resolution called for a ban on U.S. military assistance to Israel, an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of all Israeli settlers from the West Bank, and the prosecution of the fascist, Zionist government of Israel for war crimes.

During the discussion of the resolution, a PLP member pointed out that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have a long history of “anti-terrorism” training of police and sheriffs from large U.S. cities and counties. These are the same racist sheriffs and cops who carry out court-ordered evictions and protect the landlords’ properties in LA County. Another LITU member drew the connection between solidarity on a local level and the international solidarity of working-class tenants across all bosses’ borders. The tenants who attended the meeting voted unanimously to support the resolution.

On to May Day

Several tenants asked what they could do to show support for the anti-war resolution. LITU leaders proposed we go as a group to a local demonstration protesting the genocide in Gaza. PLP’s next steps will be to bring a contingent of tenants to an anti-war action in our area and invite them to our May Day activities.

Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two are connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations in the leadership. Many Black fighters were dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression” to find out more.”

Part II explored how the international communist movement was the impetus of the Civil Rights Movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College. Part III covered the class contradictions of Martin Luther King, Jr., as influenced by the Communist Party.  
Part IV takes a look at the Harlem Rebellion and its communist influence.

The Harlem Rebellion of 1964 shook the United States bosses and resonated around the world as the struggle against racism expanded from the fight against Jim Crow in the South to the cities of the North. Once again the communist movement helped lead and was deeply influenced by the fight against racism in the U.S.

The rebellion, sparked by the police killing a young Black man in cold blood, occurred at a moment when the working class around the world was rising up, led by the communist movement centered around the Chinese Communist Party. The fledgling Progressive Labor Movement born out of the rise of the working class in China, was also shaped by the Harlem Rebellion.

KKKops murder child in cold blood

In July 1964, 15 year-old James Powell was playing with friends on the sidewalk across from his school in the white neighborhood of Yorkville, when a building superintendent sprayed them down with a hose and unleashed a series of racial epithets at the Black children. The school kids ran to the super to get him to stop, and a cop, Thomas Gilligan, watching from across the street came at the group and shot James Powell in front of numerous witnesses.

Immediately about 300 Black students from the school rallied at the site of the murder and confronted the police on the scene demanding Gilligan’s arrest and inspiring the rebellion.

Two days of peaceful protests ensued. But on the third day, a crowd surrounded the police precinct, calling for Gilligan’s arrest, and was met with swinging clubs of the New York Police Department. Rainfall of glass bottles and garbage can lids was thrown by residents from rooftops above. Gunfire broke out after police pushed thousands of demonstrators back a few blocks toward the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue '' (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).

Communist movement sparked Black workers’ rebellions

The rebellion started only weeks after the U.S. had passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act which was Lyndon Johnson’s response to the growing Civil Rights Movement in the South. That movement and the world-wide movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was politicizing the working class. The working class in China, had been victimized by the brutality of British, Japanese and U.S. imperialism.  The history of imperialism was inseparable from the racist theories of the British ruling class. The victory of the working class in China inspired workers all over the world to rise up against imperialism and sharpened the struggle against racism. In Vietnam, the working class was in the process of defeating the largest imperialist power the world had ever seen, the war machine of the U.S. bosses.  In the U.S., even as legal segregation and racism was being brought down in the South, Black workers in the North were taking on the embedded racism of liberal capitalism.

The overwhelming majority of Black New Yorkers saw their quality of life decline, whether it’s school segregation, housing segregation, unemployment, earnings… [in the] period between the end of World War II and the 1964 riot… “This was Northern racism, which was quite different from Southern racism, in that Northern racism was covert,” says Joseph Boskin, history professor emeritus at Boston University.

Racism is the lifeblood of capitalism

Boskin, who conducted interviews in Harlem after the [rebellion], says the unmet expectations of Black Americans in the North were starting to push some of them toward more militant routes for change, despite a national narrative of what seemed to be progress in the country’s laws” (New York’s ‘Night Of Birmingham Horror’ Sparked A Summer Of Riots, WNYC 7/18/14).

The Progressive Labor Movement (PLM), the young forerunner to Progressive Labor Party (PLP), grew out of the rebellion and played a leading role at the same time. PLM produced a poster, ‘Wanted for Murder - Gilligan the Cop” that became the banner of the struggle carried by thousands of people in the streets. The PLM organized marches and rallies even after the New York City bosses tried to ban all political activity.

The ruling class in New York, who thought of themselves as the “decent” bosses compared to the Jim Crow Southern capitalists, were caught off-guard by the anger of Black workers in Harlem who suffered under extreme inequality.

The Harlem median family income was $3,995 compared to …$6,100 [for all NYC], unemployment in Harlem was 300% higher than in the rest of the city, substandard housing was 49% [of all housing] while in the rest of NYC it was 15%, infant mortality was 45.3 per 1000 births but only 26.3 in the rest of the city…Life magazine lamented that “the only force that had the guts to give political direction to the spontaneous rebellion was PL” (Progressive Labor, Vol. 10, No. 1, August-September 1975).

The Harlem Rebellion exposed racism as part of capitalism, even in U.S.’s most liberal center, NYC. After Harlem, within weeks, rebellions broke out in Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago and Philadelphia and over the next few years there were major rebellions in Watts (1965), Newark (1967) and Detroit (1967). Then in 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, rebellions broke out in cities across the country and workers and students around the world, most notably in France and Chicago, shook capitalism.

Liberal rulers unleash racist attacks, bury antiracist history

The ruling class has tried to write off the rebellions by calling them riots and dismissing the contribution and courage of the tens of thousands of Black workers who were part of the movement. But even now, 60 years later, the truth of the Harlem Rebellion has not been erased.
Part of the confusion is that in the North, many of the laws were not openly discriminatory,…It made it harder to seize the moral high ground and argue that nonviolent civil disobedience was justified.

So, growing frustrations found an outlet on the streets, according to Billy Mitchell, historian of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.
“It wasn’t just people just wild n’ out, you know, and just going crazy. They understood what they were doing,”…
Looking back, Mitchell says he doesn’t completely condone the violent response. But he says it was necessary.
“Sometimes you have got to really do something extraordinary or uncommon to get the attention of people,” he adds.
 (In the Heat of the Summer: The Harlem Riot of 1964 and the Road to America’s Prison Crisis).

The U.S. ruling class responded to the mass demonstrations and anti-imperialist movements with both terror and political crumbs. Police and soldiers fired on and killed civil rights demonstrators and students fighting racism and war in Orangeburg, SC, Jackson State, MS and Kent State, OH.

Combined with the brutal attacks, the ruling class enacted a series of reforms in cities with concentrations of Black workers. Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty funneling millions of dollars to create community programs. The Democratic Party and northern capitalists spent millions getting Black mayors elected across the country.

The FBI revved up its Cointelpro Program. It was a covert operation to target PLP and other groups to try to destroy the anti-imperialist movement. Leaders of PLP were arrested and some were convicted and jailed, others harassed and fired. Through those struggles and in the years since we’ve tried to keep up the fight against racism and build an integrated organization.

Black workers key to communist revolution

Black workers who have borne the brunt of racism and led the fight against it must be in the leadership of any working-class struggle and movement for communism. There will be no forward progress for the working class without the leadership of Black workers and a massive struggle against racism.