The following is the text from a speech at a January West Wednesday rally in Baltimore, given by a member of Progressive Labor Party. Tyrone, 44, was murdered by Baltimore kkkops on July 18, 2013. The family and the West Coalition have been protesting every Wednesday since.
Tyrone West was an early casualty of World War III. Now, why do I say that?
Let’s take a human relationship, a loving relationship between two people. There are always difficulties that arise. And if you can put your finger on the main difficulty, and solve that, everything else kind of falls in line.
Now, in the world, there’s one conflict that is the main conflict at the moment, and it influences every other development in the world. The main conflict in the world today is the rivalry between the major world powers, to see who’s gonna be top dog. The U.S., China, Russia—the major powers all want the same three things. They want cheap labor. After all, Nike spends about two dollars and fifty cents a day for their workers in Indonesia to put the shoes together. They want cheap labor. They want markets to sell their stuff. And they want raw materials like oil and everything else.
And sooner or later, as the U.S. declines as a world power, and other powers rise—due to the law of uneven development—sooner or later another power is gonna challenge the U.S. You know how China, in the South China Sea, have taken over these coral reefs that were under water, dumped sand on them, and created seven islands. And on each island now they have a military-grade airport, anti-aircraft missiles. And they’re not messing around. The U.S. keeps sending warships through there, challenging their control of the South China Sea. Thirty percent of the maritime trade in the world goes through the South China Sea.
Obama is now sending the Third Fleet to Asia to join the Seventh Fleet, which means sixty percent of the U.S. military is gonna be in Asia for the first time, ‘cause the ruling class knows that’s the likely place where the major challenges are gonna come to the U.S. empire.
Now let me take us back to World War I. In the U.S. there were a lot of people opposed to that war. They said, just like the upcoming war, it was a war between gangsters who want to control the world for their own profit. And what did the U.S. ruling class do? They had the Ku Klux Klan knock on your door if you didn’t want to join the military and agree to conscription. They terrorized people.
In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of police, and hundreds of thousands of troops have been used time and again to break strikes, to put down prison rebellions, to put down uprisings like the one from Freddie Gray. And so we’ve seen again and again how organized violence has been used against us.
But on a day-to-day level, they have a need to try to intimidate the working class. And the leading section of the working class, the most bold, the strongest, is the Black working class in the U.S. And that’s why, in this country, if you’re Black, you’re five or six times more likely than a white person, to be unarmed and killed by a cop. Because the ruling class knows who the main leaders are gonna be in the upcoming struggles, and they want to put fear in the hearts of people, and try to stop that.
As they gear up for war, they’re gonna do that more and more. And that’s why I say that Tyrone was an early victim of World War III, and the preparations for that war, and that direction that the world is moving.
Now we can do something about this! When that period arises, and we see a major conflict developing, we have to take the nuclear trigger out of the hands of the ruling class, and minimize the casualties to humanity. That’s our responsibility. It’s not an easy task, but that’s our responsibility.
And in order to do that, we’re gonna need a much larger communist movement. We need more people to seriously read Challenge, to join the Progressive Labor Party and think about dedicating their lives to destroying this system, and building a sisterly, brotherly world where there will be no more people treated like Tyrone West!
And in the new Challenge there’s an article on West Wednesday on page three. I’d like to encourage everybody to read that. And in the long run, we have to win this struggle, but even more important, we have to prepare to win bigger and bigger struggles in the future!
#communists dump on capitalism at #WomensMarchOnWashington, protesters join in.#notjusttrump pic.twitter.com/39NzUniuzL
— PLP Challenge (@PLPchallenge) January 23, 2017
A Donald Trump presidency means a continuation of Barack Obama’s wage-killing exploitation, economic crises, racist and sexist demagoguery, persecution of immigrants, ever-widening inequality, and plans for broader inter-imperialist conflict. It can also be one of mass fightback! Communists have a vital role to play in this volatile period. Multiracial unity is our most powerful weapon. Our job is to organize the international working class to defend itself and fight back.
Trump was clearly not the first choice of the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. The finance capitalists were more comfortable with the racist, sexist Hillary Clinton, a proven general for U.S. imperialism. But the bosses are flexible and resourceful, and they’ll exert all of their power to bend Trump to their will. To maintain their dominance, protect their oil profits, and build support for the next big ground war, the bosses will move to bring workers from across the political spectrum into line. As the Council on Foreign Relations, the leading think tank for U.S. main-wing, finance capitalism, observes:
Trump may provoke lasting political realignments. On the right, this will most likely take the form of a resurgence in muscular exceptionalism, which would call Americans to unite in confronting a freedom-hating enemy (perhaps China, Iran, or Russia). Less predictable, but potentially more interesting, will be the opposition from the left. After eight years of deferring to Obama, the left now has an opportunity to get creative. For instance, left-wing Democrats (and some Republicans) may attempt to constrain the power of the executive, as occurred after World War I and the Vietnam War, but after the war in Iraq has not.
Relative to its rivals in Russia and China, the U.S. ruling class is internally divided and in accelerating decline. The volatility around Trump’s incoming presidency makes the U.S. bosses even more vulnerable. It is too early to gauge Trump’s impact on the splits that plague the ruling class. The rulers themselves are as unsure of how to make a Trump presidency work best for them. But we can be certain that the bosses’ relentless drive for profits will intensify their attacks on the international working class.
Obama’s War Legacy
Assassin-in-Chief Obama paved the road for Trump to continue wholesale killing with drones. As of January 2016, Obama had authorized more than five hundred drone strikes, killing 3,040 people labeled as terrorists and 391 civilians (New York Times, 1/12/16). Trump’s racist anti-Muslim policies were derived from Obama’s racist military attacks on the working class in the Middle East. Obama’s efforts to institutionalize and normalize the practice of drone strikes will be now be pushed by Trump.
Eight years of a Barack Obama presidency has resulted in mass deportations (a record 2.5 million through 2015), a bank bailout ($700 billion) and rampant, racist police terror. But Obama did little to assuage the bosses’ biggest concern: the waning of patriotism among disaffected U.S. workers, and their lack of enthusiasm for a military draft for the next ground war.
The U.S. military is essential to U.S. capitalist dominance around the world. While Trump may have made isolationist-sounding campaign promises to cancel trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or to step back from NATO and give Russia freer rein in Eastern Europe, make no mistake. Trump will be a war president. As Foreign Affairs (1/3) noted,
Trump never promised to retract the United States’ global power. To the contrary, he vowed to build up the military, go after Islamist terrorism, and counter Chinese aggression. An isolationist he is not.
The Brookings Institute, another top imperialist think tank, laments Obama’s decision to avoid “messy” conflicts that would require, “sizing military forces in particular for larger-scale stabilization missions. In other words, he directed the armed forces not even to retain the capability to do big things that extended beyond their warfighting comfort zones” (1/6). The report encourages Trump to correct Obama’s mistake before the next war.
All Capitalists Are Our Enemies
Based on the people he’s nominated to cabinet-level positions, Trump could represent an opportunity to unify the rulers’ dominant section with the wing represented by more domestically oriented capitalists.
The jobs that deal directly with profits generated within the U.S. are going to allies of domestically focused bosses like Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are “well positioned to influence the Trump administration, with many allies in important cabinet and transition positions” (Times, 1/6). For example, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, received $175,000 from the Koch brothers’ network for a nonprofit Pruitt helps lead (Politico, 12/27/16).
On the other hand, Trump’s appointment of Walter “Jay” Clayton to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency that polices and regulates Wall Street, is a clear nod to the finance capital section of the ruling class. Clayton is a lawyer who has represented mega-banks like Barclays and JPMorgan Chase. He also handled the U.S. Treasury Department’s capital investment in Goldman Sachs, where his wife is a private wealth advisor. Mike Sherrod, a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, stated,
“It’s hard to see how an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump’s promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from ‘getting away with murder’” (NYT, 1/4).
The bosses will continue to use Trump’s racist rhetoric to divide the working class by blaming Black and Latin workers for unlivable wages and housing conditions. The Republican Party, in particular, will use openly racist, far-right movements to deepen this divide. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party will use Trump’s presidency to mislead the working class into dead-end, liberal social reform movements, while pushing the lie that voting can change capitalism.
Even as friction within the ruling class heightens, the bosses will do their best to use Trump’s presidency to serve their common interest in maximum profit, and to attack the working class to that end.
Same Enemy, Same Fight
Historically, workers have fought together against their oppressors from the very inception of capitalism. Although we understand that the profit system can never be reformed to serve workers’ needs, reform movements and tactics--rallies, strikes, walkouts, and local fights against racism and sexism—can be extremely valuable for our class. They build unity with our class brothers and sisters. Most important, they teach us how to fight the bosses.
Like the Obama presidency before it, Trump’s presidency is hazardous to the international working class--and an opportunity for mass militancy. Since the November elections, we have seen thousands of workers hit the streets with their fists in the air, ready to fight back against capitalism. Trump’s open racism can be smashed only by multiracial unity. We must continue to struggle with misled workers to fight back against the true beast. Only a multiracial mass movement for communist revolution can smash capitalism and all of its lies.
Our ultimate goal is communism. It can be realized only with mass revolutionary violence by millions of workers and youth--by people just like you. United as one class, freed from exploitation and artificial borders, the working class can build a new world from the ashes of the old. Join the Progressive Labor Party! When you do, you will be joining hands with billions of fighters past, present, and future. The world belongs to the international working class, but only if we dare to fight for it.
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Transit Workers Gearing Up to Strike, Open to Communism
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- 14 January 2017 169 hits
WASHINGTON, DC, January 5—The path to revolution for a communist society includes leading militant battles against racist, capitalist attacks on our class. In the Amalgamated Transportation Union Local 689, Progressive Labor Party members are struggling with their co-workers to intensify the fight against management.
A strong union strike would not only push back against management attacks, but would strengthen the working class for the many battles ahead on the road to a communist revolution. For transit workers this requires exposing how the current union leaders collaborate with management. At Metro, and all around the world, communist leadership is needed for the struggles against the bosses’ attacks today, and for communism, workers’ power, tomorrow. A stronger PLP organization at Metro is a step in this direction.
Progressive Labor Party joined over 100 workers and riders at a union town hall meeting. The union leadership called the meeting supposedly to resist Metro’s efforts to balance its budget for the next fiscal year. The anti-working class attacks that Metro is proposing includes cutting bus and rail service, laying off workers, freezing wages, and eliminating new workers from the defined benefit pension plan. These attacks are all racist as they disproportionately affect Black workers the most. And racism weakens the working class and hurts all workers.
Politicians, Bosses, and Union Leaders Cozy Up
Some politicians spoke at the meeting to “support” our struggle, but this lie was met with much skepticism. Malcolm Augustine, a member of the Metro Board of Directors, said he favored increasing headways (the time between runs) rather than eliminating lines. Workers told him that this proposal would also mean cutting jobs. He quickly tried to change his story.
Another worker asked him about the Board’s efforts to eliminate new workers from the pension system. When he claimed he did not know about this, the local union president jumped in to defend him and his supposed ignorance, claiming the Board was not responsible for the proposals attacking the union pension system.
We got a glimpse of the way the current union leadership fawns over Metro bosses instead of taking them on!
From Rallies to Revolution,Workers Must Fight Back
The ongoing crisis of capitalism and the weakness of the labor movement have made the bosses much more determined to make these cuts. A PLP member at the meeting drove home this point. Although Metro management has proposed cuts in the past, workers and riders have fought them with partial success through rallies and mass attendance at public hearings. Today, more intense struggle is needed. We are organizing for a strike while strengthening the working class for future battles.
The union is planning a major rally at the final budget hearing at Metro Headquarters on January 30. We will be there fighting the bosses’ cutbacks and building a strong, multiracial working class that builds for a communist revolution!
