The U.S. bosses are contemplating another imperialist war on the Korean peninsula. Like all imperialists they don’t want the international working class knowing the real history of Korea. Like all imperialists they are terrified that if the workers in the U.S. and Korea knew about the “forgotten” Korean War, the workers would unite, turn the guns around, and shoot this imperialist system down.
Jeju. Koje. No Gun Ri. Daejeon. Sinchon. These are the names of some places in present-day North Korea that the international working class must never forget, alongside countless others where workers said “enough” to imperialist war and fought back.
Part of fighting to keep the memory and history of the working class of Korea alive is understanding how there came to be a “North” and “South” Korea in the first place.
Korea: From Feudalism to Fascism to Socialism
The Korean peninsula was a largely feudal kingdom until Japanese imperialists invaded in 1910. Korean workers and peasants were considered subhuman to the Japanese fascists. Japanese fascism meant Korean men grew food for the army in slave-like conditions, and Korean women were forced into sex slavery.
On August 15, 1945, the communist-led Soviet Red Army liberated the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. imperialists had just dropped atomic bombs on their Japanese imperialist rivals, and threatened the Red Army if they moved south.
What became “North” Korea literally changed overnight. On day one:
- “People’s Committees” led by women and youth, accountable to mass meetings in every village, were the new government.
- Landlords were arrested or driven out.
- Japanese fascist soldiers, police, Japanese-trained Korean police, government officials, and collaborators were thrown into their own prisons.
- All forms of sex slavery were abolished.
- Education, healthcare, childcare, housing, transportation, clothing, meaningful employment, leisure, access to culture, freedom of choice in relationships and marriage were guaranteed to all workers.
- Over the next several years, workers in the North built the foundations of socialism, modeled on the then-socialist Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, U.S. bosses kept the Japanese fascists in power in what became South Korea. They maintained every aspect of Japanese rule, including sex slavery, and opened segregated brothels for the U.S. military.
U.S. Imperialists Respond with Massacre
When workers in the South learned about the advances in the North through the Communist Party, they formed their own People’s Committees and rebelled. On Jeju island, an estimated 80 percent of the island’s 300,000 workers were communists, and in 1948 a rebellion erupted against the U.S. occupation. The U.S. burned the entire island in response.
Massacres like this occurred with greater frequency and desperation under U.S. imperialism. With a taste of workers’ power in the North, the working class refused to submit and dared to resist.
In 1950, the U.S. finally attempted outright invasion of the North. Demonstrations supporting the North erupted worldwide. The monstrous Korean war raged for three years and claimed millions of workers’ lives. The workers fought on—even under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the U.S. bosses—and showed the world the meaning of mass bravery.
Workers’ power was later reversed in North Korea, and PLP has analyzed the failures of socialism elsewhere.
The U.S. bosses call Korea “The Forgotten War” precisely because they hope it will be forgotten. But the working class of Korea will never be forgotten. PLP aspires to the legacy of the Korean workers’ commitment to revolution. Deserving that legacy means fighting onward to the final victory of communism. Our victory will be their vengeance.
Many in the U.S. believe Black and white workers live separately and attend separate schools because they want to live with “their own kind.” This belief couldn’t be further from the truth! Black, white, and immigrant workers in the U.S. live separately because of housing segregation, a history not taught in capitalist schools. Segregation means the deliberate racial separation the capitalist class enforces through their state—their government, laws, courts, schools, prisons, and racist police. The capitalist class relies on housing segregation to enable other types of segregation, which all promote racism and divisions within the working class.
Communists have a long history of leading antiracist struggles against segregation and for integration. Integration and multiracial unity build the international working-class unity we need to smash this racist, imperialist capitalist system with communist revolution!
The history of housing segregation—and the history of countless neighborhoods that workers in the U.S. live in today—dates back to the 1930s.
1930s: Red-Led Workers Fight Like Hell
During the depths of capitalism’s “Great Depression” of the 1930s, millions of U.S. workers were organized or directly influenced by the Communist Party. From California to New York to Alabama, from the cities to the fields, communism was a mass movement. Through organizing labor unions to defending the Scottsboro Boys to fighting the Ku Klux Klan and racist police terror, the Communist Party earned the respect of masses of Black, immigrant, and white workers.Communist-led rebellions and fightback terrified the U.S. capitalist class with revolution. Under liberal Democrat president Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal,” the bosses created social programs that provided some relief from the Depression’s devastation while preserving Jim Crow and the worst aspects of U.S. racism. In contrast with the multiracial unity of the Communist Party, the Federal Housing Authority mandated that newly established public housing “projects” across the U.S. were “whites-only.”
World War II and Korea’s Challenge
The U.S. entered World War II still in the midst of the Great Depression. To try to build U.S. nationalism for the war effort, the bosses desegregated parts of the Army. Black and white soldiers who fought Nazi fascism side-by-side returned battle-hardened, and many were committed anti-fascists who celebrated the communist-led Soviet Union’s leadership of the war.
Faced with segregation in housing back home in the U.S., they fought back. Black soldiers denied apartments in whites-only housing projects in New York demanded an end to the segregated public housing projects. At New York City’s largest public college campus, City College, Black and white returning veterans led a student strike against segregated dorms.
Soldiers who were drafted to the genocidal Korean War in 1950 bitterly opposed the U.S. One in three captured U.S. soldiers “actively supported” the communist-led Red Army of China and North Korea, causing the U.S. bosses to panic that “never before in history had so many captured Americans gone to the aid of the enemy” (NYT, 1/6/57).
Once again, an angry and united working class challenged the U.S. bosses’ racist and imperialist plans!
Bosses’ Response: “Suburbs”
The U.S. bosses’ response went further than it had in the 1930s: they adopted a plan to draw white workers into newly created “suburban” towns. Levittown, a “suburb” town outside of New York City, became the model for racist housing developments all around the country.“Bill Levitt [the developer of Levittown] only sold houses to white buyers, excluding African Americans…By 1953, the 70,000 people who lived in Levittown constituted the largest community in the United States with no black residents.Activist groups across the U.S. and even individuals within Levittown, who united under the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown, protested the Levitts’ racist policies....but [the courts] ruled that federal agencies were not responsible for preventing housing discrimination (ushistoryscene.com).”Suburbs made it possible for U.S. bosses to legally abolish Jim Crow segregation in schools in 1954, while on the other hand intensifying housing segregation. And even though schools were legally desegregated, the new suburbs allowed the creation of “de facto” segregated majority-white schools.
Nationalism and Racism are Inseparable
The U.S. capitalist class responded politically to the antiracist fightback for integration by pushing nationalism and anticommunism. In the bosses’ attempts to rewrite history, they painted communists as the enemy while throwing crumbs to the working class.“
In 1957, William and Daisy Myers, a black couple with young children, bought a house in Levittown…with little help from the local police to keep the mobs of angry racists from congregating outside their home day and night.White residents of Levittown and other still segregated communities across the country [used] “Americanism” as justification for racial exclusivity, and painted those who sought to enforce integration as…communist. Suburbs across America were closely intertwined with the preservation of the capitalist American way in the face of growing Soviet international influence (ushistoryscene.com).”
Capitalists created racism—racist divisions never existed within the working class in the first place. Segregation in any form is racist. Today, the U.S. bosses’ rule depends on convincing the working class that segregation is somehow natural, and communism is somehow unnatural.At one high school in Brooklyn where students and teachers fight for school integration and multiracial unity, the bosses desperately hope they can scare workers away by branding antiracists as “communists.” The Progressive Labor Party embraces our class’ proud history of fighting for racial integration! The capitalist class can’t rule without racism, and racism can’t be maintained without some forms of segregation. Segregation is intertwined with this capitalist system, and when workers are united once again in a mass PLP, communist revolution will destroy it!
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Philando Castile: Black Workers Assassinated Once in the Street, Once More in Courts
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- 13 July 2017 149 hits
Capitalism rules by both deception and force. This is apparent in the murder of Philando Castile, and the subsequent acquittal of the kkkop who killed him. On July 6, 2016, Diamond Reynolds live-streamed the moments directly after her boyfriend was shot multiple times by police officer Jeronimo Yanez. About eleven months later, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all three charges against Yanez.
A huge part of Yanez’s defense was the accusation that Philando was a drug user, but police reports and news made no mention of drug use. It was only later that, kkkop Yanez said, and implored jurors to believe, “I feared for my life...I thought...if he had the audacity to use marijuana...to just smoke in front of his five-year-old...if he could just do that and give her secondhand smoke and endanger her life, what did he care about me. I really felt scared.”
Progressive Labor Party has a very different view of what happened. Yanez—along with the Falcon Heights Police Department and the criminal justice system at large—is riding the coattails of an old bosses’ ploy: character assassination. As a grandson of Malcolm X wisely observed: “Character assassination is before the physical assassination, so one has to be made killable in the eyes of the public in order for their eventual murder to then be deemed justifiable.”
The vicious and racist ruling class began to make Philando Castile killable, along with all those who look like him, during the so-called War on Drugs, beginning in the 1970s. In reality, illegal drug use is approximately equal across all races, but Black and Latin workers are routinely
arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for drugs at much higher rates. So with the character, dignity, and humanity of Black workers being stripped away for decades, we are seeing widespread state-sanctioned carnage, rationalized by the bosses with racist criminalization.
Tawanda Jones, sister of Baltimore’s Tyrone West—murdered by a notorious plainclothes unit of the city’s kkkops says, “We won’t stop, can’t stop, ‘til killer cops are in cell blocks!” After he was beaten to death by more than 10 cops in July 2013, the claim was made that Tyrone had a package of drugs under one of his socks. They claimed this became evident when he was forced to sit on the curb, and his pants leg lifted.
The truth, however, is that Tyrone was wearing shorts, and his socks were just ankle height. As with Philando Castile, it was part of a smear campaign and character assassination.
Beware of the bosses’ character slander! Communism will fight racism at every level, just like the workers shut down the streets of St. Paul. Reject their lies! We need you to join the fight for a society that has no use for racism or police murderers terrorizing the working class. We need you to fight for communism. Workers of the world unite!
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PL’er Confronts Anti-Immigrant Fascists, Galvanize Antiracists
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- 13 July 2017 170 hits
NEW YORK CITY—We can’t permit any racist actions! This thought was on my mind today, the day the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light for openly racist President Donald Trump’s fascist executive order to go into effect. The Supreme Court allowed the ban which prohibits persons from six mostly Arab, Muslim countries from entering the U.S., an attempt by the US government to further divide the working class along racial and nationalistic lines.
Some members of the Progressive Labor Party joined an emergency protest called by the NY Immigration Coalition. The protest began in Union Square as about 600 people chanted, “No Ban, No Wall” and “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” Several representatives of the Democratic Party spoke at the protest. These politicians put on a mask of being anti-racist while in reality, their political agenda differs only slightly from the Republicans who hold power in Congress, and support racist and sexist policies that serve the capitalist bosses.
After the speeches, we began the march to the headquarters of the union 32BJ where there was an immigration forum. As we marched we chanted in English and Spanish. I was in the front with my organization. At the union local, we encountered four racists in front of the police who held up signs saying “Syrians out.”
None of the “leaders” of the march said anything to confront the racists. As a communist in PLP, full of anger, I held my anti-racist sign in the faces of these KKK types and began to chant loudly. All the protesters joined in with loud chants until the police moved the fascist provocateurs to the opposite sidewalk. The anti-racist marchers applauded, gave thumbs up and fists in the air. It was very moving for me to be able to show on a small scale how a communist member of PLP can give leadership. I remembered a saying I learned in my youth, “Where a communist is born, difficulties die.”
This is what we communists must keep in mind as we prepare for the day that we are a Party of masses around the world ready to launch revolution for the seizure of workers’ power and the building of a communist society. Meanwhile these small actions show the difference between the message of communists, and reformists, who allow racists to spout their hateful rhetoric under the excuse of “Free Speech.”
At the end of the protest someone handed me a megaphone and I continued to chant energetically, joined by the other demonstrators until we entered the union hall for the forum. We must not be silent in the face of racist attacks on workers, nor be deceived by liberal misleaders who attack the working class at every opportunity, we must continue to fight for communism!
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MTA Workers Demand on the-Job Safety, but Off Track with Anti-Rider Politics
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- 13 July 2017 157 hits
BROOKLYN, May 18—Chanting, “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Assaults have got to go!” over 50 MTA workers rallied and marched from the union hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to 2 Broadway (MTA headquarters) against the rising number of MTA workers being assaulted on the job.
The organizers who led the march are from one of the many MTA factions trying to fight for an active union to defend its membership. This non-union-led march brought together MTA workers from different titles (conductors, train operators, cleaners, bus drivers) to call on the union and MTA bosses to protect their workforce. Many workers and tourists along the march route chanted and cheered. Random yelling of “MTA sucks!” and “No fare hikes!” and car honking in solidarity greeted the marchers.
No Safety Under Capitalism
Speaker after speaker condemned the MTA bosses for not protecting their workforce, instead using lawyers to deny worker’s compensation to those out of work from assaults. When a worker is assaulted, if they are not wearing all their protective equipment their claims can be denied, forcing many workers back to work or into debt. If you were assaulted and you weren’t wearing your gloves, we can’t pay you. That is the MTA’s mantra.
The rally and march ended when a hearse arrived and laid a casket in front of the MTA headquarters. A speaker made the point that it’s only when MTA workers die that the bosses act!
According to an internal memo from the MTA on assaults in the subways from the past five months, 76 workers were assaulted. The attacks are mostly workers being spat on. They also
include objects thrown at workers and female workers being sexually assaulted. Verbal abuse is not counted as part of the assaults although it’s a daily occurrence for workers. Since these statistics came out at least another 20 subway workers have reported assaults. The report leaves out the many surface workers (bus operators) who face a far higher rate of assault within the MTA.
Workers Discuss Solutions Centered On Bosses’ System
The solution for most at the rally all centered around the bosses’ courts and cops. People talked about fighting for an increase in police presence on buses and subways. Others added, the need to reach out to supportive politicians to change the laws to create stiffer penalties for people who attack workers. One speaker discussed building an alliance between customers and MTA workers.
But the bosses’ solutions to workers’ safety are their own tools of oppression: more cops, more convictions, and more divisions between members of the working class.
Since the rally, there have been many conversations about next steps. Though there is not much agreement on the next step. The only clear agreement is that we have to do something.
Build Class Consciousness Through Struggle
Progressive Labor Party has seen time and time again: that bosses only protect profits. The bosses only care about giving workers the bare minimum. The answer to the attacks is not fascist attacks (in the form of arrest) on riders. The system does enough killing via the racist police in our neighborhoods. Let’s not demand as workers the terrorization of members of our class. We need more class-consciousness, gained through struggle. We need rider-worker unity against the bosses. Only then will we defeat the attacks.
Members of the Transit Workers’ Union (TWU) must develop the idea that an attack on one worker is an attack on every worker. If the cops kill someone, the TWU workers must answer the call to fight back. If there is a push to lower the fare, the TWU workers must answer the call to fight back. When the bosses try to shut a hospital or make healthcare cuts, TWU workers must answer the call. When TWU workers join the fightback within the city, then and only then will the assault percentages drop. TWU workers have to stand with other workers. And the fight for communism must lead the reform struggle! Workers are stronger together and workers should fight for each other!
