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Bella Ciao, Lorrell! A passionate communist leader gone too soon
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- 21 January 2024 226 hits
On November 30th, 2023, we lost Lorrell, a devoted comrade, organizer, teacher, leader, and friend, to a medical complication. Her absence creates a hole in our lives that is immense and unfathomable. Trying to understand this tragedy is impossible and awful. We will carry on in her memory but what has been lost can never be replaced. We will do her justice by celebrating her life, spirit, and commitment to the international working class.
Early life, meeting Progressive Labor Party
Lorrell spent her early years in the southeast suburbs of Chicago, a region marked by brutal environmental racism due to concentrations of heavy industry and pollution. Undoubtedly witnessing firsthand from a young age how capitalism treats whole populations of workers – particularly Black and Brown workers – as disposable, influenced Lorrell’s understanding of the system and fueled her desire to fight to destroy it.
She met the Progressive Labor Party while a university student and quickly became a committed comrade in the struggle for revolution. Her sharp insights on how racism is indispensable to capitalism notably superseded the liberal interpretations of race and class within the mass movement in general. Her dialectical understanding of how racism, sexism, and capitalism all work to reinforce one another and oppress all working people influenced her to organize firmly based on multiracial working-class unity.
After graduating college, Lorrell committed herself to teaching at local universities attended by working-class students. She also worked as a program director for a disability rights organization, one of her life’s principal passions. She went above and beyond to fight alongside other workers with disabilities to demand their respect and basic accommodations so often denied under the profit system.
Although Lorrell always acknowledged the scale of the class struggle in nearby Chicago, she never once abandoned what she saw as revolutionary potential in workers and students in the smaller towns and cities of Northwest Indiana where she lived. To this end, she passionately advocated like she did for so many other issues for their inclusion in the Party’s overall political work. Because of her, countless people became closer to PLP and remain in our base to this day.
Tireless leadership fighting racism, sexism, and capitalism
As Lorrell’s experience and commitment grew, she was asked to give more leadership, joining the area city committee which included leaders from Chicago and Northwest Indiana clubs. Lorrell played a great role in this body and especially stepped up in 2016 when two leaders were gone for the year. During this year she helped plan the demonstration we held in front of the home of Jason Van Dyke, the racist kkkop murderer of 17-year-old Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
This action took weeks of planning and multiple meetings to make sure everyone agreed with and was committed to the plan. Security planning was crucial given we were directly targeting Van Dyke where he lived. The action was successful and caught Van Dyke unaware—the dirtbag was actually out front watering his lawn when we marched up! This was one of the sharpest actions that took place nationally that year.
That same summer she led another struggle after city bosses in East Chicago tried to abruptly uproot the majority Black worker residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex after allowing them and their children to live for decades on soil contaminated with lead and arsenic. Lorrell personally made connections with mothers whose children had suffered serious health effects, driving them to doctor appointments as well as protests.
When the GEO corporation was trying to build an immigrant detention center in her area, Lorrell organized to have people oppose their efforts at every turn. She organized workers to go to council meetings and speak out against this racist project. Gary, Indiana is a majority Black city and as a Black worker, she spoke of solidarity with immigrants of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Gary and the surrounding areas needed jobs (since so much manufacturing left the area) but she argued fiercely that jobs jailing other workers was not what the region needed or wanted. This was a struggle that was won—GEO did not get to build their immigrant jail.
Lorrell also participated in a coalition group that found out that a local airport was being used weekly to deport immigrants from the area. Weekly protests at the airport began and Lorrell once again played a leading role. Rejecting the average performative liberal protest tactics, she helped lead other workers onto the actual airport tarmac towards the airplanes during one particularly memorable confrontation against security forces in 2017.
Like millions of other antiracists around the world, Lorrell dove headlong into the mass rebellions that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. She was a mainstay in all the protests in the region, pushing the envelope to be more openly confrontational with the killer cops and gutter racists across the suburbs. The militant organizing spaces that she helped develop stayed busy in the years that followed, notably when staging mass antisexist protests around reproductive justice after the reversal of Roe v Wade in 2022.
Her memory marches on
Lorrell was the stabilizing force in her family and cared for the previous generation with devotion and kindness. Whether it was driving her aunt, mom, or dad to their doctor’s appointments, or having them move in with her, she always went the extra mile. Losing her is being felt deeply by her immediate family, her comrades, and her friends.
Speaking with a friend, she said, “You know, if something were to happen to me, don't mourn me with candles. Make it loud and revolutionary. Make it reflect the movement I gave my energy and passion to. Don't stand around silently with candles. Have a bullhorn, march the street, and more than anything join the struggle I believe in so strongly.”
We will do just that, comrade. We will pick up your rifle and keep fighting this racist and sexist system that took you from us far too soon.
We want to make it clear that we can win to a [communist] perspective 99 percent of the forces who hold nationalist ideas.
NEW YORK, January 14—Over the long weekend, 25 members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) participated in a cadre school that exposed nationalism and advanced the need for an internationalist communist movement organized by the PLP. Our collective discussions will help us better understand the world, steel ourselves to fight back and grow PLP to liberate our class from capitalism. Our conclusion: we need communism to do so.
Participants included recent college graduates, a high school student, and workers with several different occupations (teachers, fitness trainers, a paraprofessional, a construction worker, a journalist, a lash tech, a social worker, a stay-at-home dad, and a retired doctor, just to name a few). The cadre school was multi-racial and multi-gendered, with leadership provided by younger members, several of whom are Black workers.
1. Where we are at
In the first workshop of the weekend, we discussed the state of the world. We read how 2023 was chock full of tragedies and capitalist horrors for the international working class, yet it was also brimming with fightback and brought with it more opportunities to build PLP and a working-class movement to smash this genocidal system.
We discussed how hard it can be to combat the cynicism and apathy that many workers and youth feel with the capitalist world as it is. Still, to not fight back is to resign ourselves to defeat. By building a communist movement with a long-term outlook, we know that one day we will turn these tragedies into their opposite. One worker shared how despite being one of the few Latino workers on his job, he is committed to fighting racist ideas and ignorance around him. This commitment to fighting back is exactly the sort of resistance with a long-term outlook the cadre school aimed to foster.
2. What we need to fight
In our second workshop, we discussed the dangers of all forms of nationalism, even so-called revolutionary nationalism. We read about specific case studies in Ukraine, Palestine, the Horn of Africa, and Israel to see how nationalism hurts workers in those regions of the world. We broke into smaller groups to focus on these case studies and then shared what we learned with one another.
As the Israeli ruling class carries out a genocide against workers in Palestine, Palestinian bosses have nothing to offer our class siblings but profiteering and pipedreams. The Palestinian ruling class, which only consists of a handful of rich families, has historically fled to neighboring nations to invest in new commercial ventures and rebuild their businesses.
In the Horn of Africa, imperialists and their lackeys have driven workers to famine through ongoing wars and power struggles. In Ukraine, the construction of a national identity and state has done nothing but give workers the option to die allying themselves with bloodsoaked US imperialists over bloodsoaked Russian imperialists.
One youth expressed his desire to join the army to defend workers in Ukraine against Russian imperialism. This prompted one of the most lively discussions of the weekend. While some friends thought it important to warn of the dangers of war, several PL’ers chimed in to explain that no imperialist war would benefit workers. If we are enlisting in the military, it must be to help turn soldiers’ guns around. The only war the working class needs is class war!
3. Where we are going
To finish out the weekend, our final workshop discussed the need for communism and critiqued the rise of identity politics. We discussed the ways that Black capitalists, women capitalists, and queer capitalists have only continued the racism and exploitation of workers around the world. We highlighted PLP’s line that we can and must move directly from capitalism to communism and asked the group whether such dramatic change is indeed possible.
In response, one PL’er shared her family’s history of fighting in wars in Eritrea. Although the struggle was ultimately nationalist despite having some Marxist-Leninist elements, her point was about how much can change in 30 years. If we fight for communism, rather than a nationalist revolution, and build our Party, imagine the amount of real change workers can achieve in even a short time!
Confidence in the working class
The cadre school showed glimmers of what is possible with communist leadership and the type of society we hope to build after a revolution. All of us took turns cooking and cleaning up after meals, and participants took turns with childcare. One member pointed out how exhausting capitalism can be and raised the need to “give one another grace” as we fight to learn and learn to fight.
One veteran comrade called this “the most united cadre school” he has been a part of. It was an example of how we can win millions to a communist understanding of the world through study and struggle. As one participant said, “ordinary people can do extraordinary things.” We have a better world to win. Join us.
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Mt. Rainer, MD Pouring opposition to politicians for genocide
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- 21 January 2024 232 hits
Mount Rainier, Maryland, January 9—A neighborhood group in this small town outside Washington, D.C. rallied in the pouring rain to protest Glenn Ivey, their congressional representative, for his outspoken support for Israel’s brutal genocidal attack on Palestinians. Not surprisingly, Ivey received massive campaign contributions ($7 million!) from the leading Zionist lobbying group in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). (Guardian, 1/10/24). A PLP member was part of this bold group who marched to his office to deliver an anti-genocide petition with 476 signatures from his constituents. Many refused to leave his office and were arrested. The grassroots movement in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters is growing everywhere, and with communist leadership from the PLP, can build a mass revolutionary movement to topple capitalism, the cause of genocide globally.
U.N. calls Palestinian conditions “horrific”
New York Times, 1/13–The twin specters of a widening regional war and intensified suffering of civilians loomed over the Middle East on Saturday as the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen threatened to respond to American airstrikes, and a senior U.N. official warned of a “horrific” humanitarian crisis in Gaza that he said was hurtling toward famine…In northern Gaza, corpses are left in the road and starving people stop aid trucks “in search of anything they can get to survive,” Martin Griffiths, the top U.N. aid official, told the United Nations Security Council on Friday. With the risk of famine in Gaza “growing by the day,” he repeated earlier criticisms of Israel, which he said was delaying or denying permission to humanitarian convoys bringing urgently needed aid to northern Gaza…Israeli attacks have killed at least 23,000 people in Gaza since, according to the Gaza health authorities. At least 1.9 million people, or 85 percent of the population, have been forced from their homes, Mr. Griffiths said.
Gaza war spreads into a wider conflict
Al Jazeera, 1/12–For months, top United States officials have repeatedly said that President Joe Biden does not want to see Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip escalate into a wider conflict in the Middle East…later, the US confirmed it had collaborated with the United Kingdom to launch “strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels'', in coordination with a handful of other countries…“It does run contrary to what the administration has been saying, but it was also inevitable, “Everybody watching this situation knew that it was a matter of time before the war in Gaza spilled out across the region…The Iran-aligned Houthis control large swaths of Yemen including the western coast overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which leads to the Red Sea. The group began firing missiles at Israel and attacking commercial ships shortly after the war on Gaza began in October.
Is inter imperialist struggle accelerating?
The Guardian, 1/13–The first of what may be many US-led air strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi Shia militants in Yemen… reflects…another unwelcome fact. The dominant power in the Middle East is no longer the US, western-aligned Egypt, Saudi Arabia or even Israel. It is the Houthis’ main ally, Iran…China has created spheres of geopolitical and economic influence to rival and, if possible, supplant those of the US… In 2021, the two countries [China and Iran] signed a 25-year strategic investment and energy pact. Under Chinese sponsorship, Iran has joined the Brics group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation…Iran sells millions of barrels of discounted crude to China each month, transported there by “dark fleet” oil tankers…With Russia…Iran supplies armed drones that Moscow uses to kill Ukrainians. US intelligence reportedly believes Russia’s Wagner mercenary group plans to provide Hezbollah with a medium-range air defense system…Iran…may soon take delivery of advanced Russian Sukhoi SU-35 fighter-bombers…nuclear weapons-related enrichment programme is reportedly advancing rapidly…an Iranian bomb, may be closer than ever.
War in Asia would be much worse
Bloomberg, 1/8–War over Taiwan would have a cost in blood and treasure so vast that even those unhappiest with the status quo have reason not to risk it. Bloomberg Economics estimate the price tag at around $10 trillion, equal to about 10% of global GDP — dwarfing the blow from the war in Ukraine, Covid pandemic and Global Financial Crisis.
China’s rising economic and military heft, Taiwan’s burgeoning sense of national identity, and fractious relations between Beijing and Washington mean the conditions for a crisis are in place…Everyone from Wall Street investors to military planners and the swathe of businesses that rely on Taiwan’s semiconductors are already moving to hedge against the risk. National security experts in the Pentagon, think tanks in the US and Japan, and global consulting firms are gaming out scenarios from a Chinese maritime “quarantine” of Taiwan, to the seizure of Taiwan’s outlying islands, and a full-scale Chinese invasion.
Since 10/7/23, the Israeli state has continued genocidal bombardment on the Gaza strip. This disproportionate retaliation has killed more than 20,000, including at least 6,000 children. Whistleblowers in the Israeli Defense Force’s own ranks report using artificial intelligence named “The Gospel” to airstrike densely populated areas, “’Nothing happens by accident. When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed” (+972 Magazine, 11/30/23). This carnage has been fully backed by a Democratic president and a ruling class of liberal fascists.
On the US side, children are also being targeted by liberal fascist Democratic mayors like Eric Adams in NYC. The NYC schools chancellor, David A. Banks, has made it clear that “politics” are to be barred from schools, except of course unless one speaks unconditionally in favor of Israel.
I know firsthand the fascism that teachers are dealing with. Since 10/7, Muslim students at my school have been afraid to come to school and to participate in after-school activities. With the murder of a 6-year-old Palestinian in Chicago and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, the students at my school are understandably afraid. I attempted to solicit support for a student letter asking that my school take a stance against genocide.
In response, I was removed from my own classroom without ever being told any charges. I “disappeared” from school which sends a signal to students that those who stand against racism are targets—that the students that I can no longer teach are acceptable collateral if it chills dissent.
But we will not be silenced! A hundred letters of support across parents, students, and alumni have reached my school. Faculty have begun to organize. Consciousness is being raised. PLP is ready to fight back. The ruling class must not be allowed to make teachers and students disposable. As we organize under conditions of rising fascism, internationalism is necessary more than ever. No worker from Gaza to NYC should ever be an acceptable casualty of fascism. We must resolve to unify and fight for communism, a future in which the international working class finally has the schools that they deserve.
