“We aren’t pro-violence, our music reflects the reality we live in,” the actor portraying O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson says in one scene to a journalist in the recently released film Straight Outta Compton. He continues, “I thought we were here to talk about Rodney King...you can’t treat people like that and not expect them to rise up.”
Racist police terror, from the everyday harassment of the Black youth living in South Central Los Angeles to the 1992 rebellions against the savage police beating of Rodney King, frame the rap group NWA utilized to make their music. Straight Outta Compton follows the rise of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E. It is a piece of capitalist garbage that dodges every opportunity to confront racism, even though racism pervades almost every scene of the film. Which makes sense, because the present-day multi-millionaire capitalists Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy’s widow were all producers of this movie, and owe their vast fortunes to being part of the very dictatorship of capitalism their music pretends to rebel against.
Fightback Takes Back Seat
NWA’s biggest hit and anthem of the Rodney King anti-racist rebellion, “F*** tha Police,” and the fight against racism that followed are still relevant today. It is Black youth that have been rebelling and taking the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, New York and Los Angeles. Instead of focusing on racism and the politics of living under every day police terror that fired NWA, however, the film focuses instead their personal struggles to become business owners. The racism that the film shows influencing them, and the heroism of the Black youth who fought back, take a back seat to the business aspirations of the young trio. Eazy-E sheds tears of disgust when the police who beat King are all acquitted from the living room of his mansion, while Dre rides through South Central in the middle of the rebellion in his new Mercedes.
NWA’s gangsta rap has its roots in the rise of gang and drug activity in South Central LA during the 70s and 80s. Ice Cube had it right when he described the gritty realities their music responds to. Art, in the form of paintings, literature or rap, is communication, and the artists’ starting points are the social and cultural environments they live in and the language they use to describe them. In the late 1980s, the art that NWA pioneered emerged from LA gang culture. LA gang culture began as a response to the crisis in political leadership that followed the anti-racist rebellions and strike waves of the 1960s and 70s. Where was the political leadership of the next generation of Black youth suppose to come from?
The vacuum in political leadership would spawn the rise of gangs, especially the the Crips and the Bloods, moniker adopted by Black soldiers serving in Vietnam. These were originally street clubs of Black youth that lived under mass unemployment, racial segregation and poverty after many of the old LA Automotive industry shut down and left the city (GM, Ford, Chrysler, Firestone and Goodyear) leaving the city with empty fields and broken down businesses, if there were any. The two would become the biggest gangs to run the streets of LA and later branch out across the country.
Ten years after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, workers lives were worse off, especially when the gang rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods hit a new high when crack cocaine hit LA in ‘81, spawned by the CIA, as a part of the Iran-Contra Affair. The best this movie did to address the capitalist sources of drugs and weapons is one passing comment by Ice Cube’s character. In a television interview, Cube wonders out loud how, if AK-47s are made in Russia, cocaine from Colombia, and nobody he knows of in the community has a passport, then who was “really” bringing them in. The movie abruptly cut to the next scene.
Rampant Sexism
With a few scenes portraying the capitalist media’s racist hostility to rap music, and period news clips attacking “gangsta rap” and denigrating the form as something less than “art,” the movie doesn’t explore what NWA’s members describe as “reality rap.” Capitalism creates the racist reality that fuels their art, ignored by the movie, as well as the rampant sexism the main characters were infected by, perpetrated, and symbolized. Eazy-E was well known for having multiple relationships and unprotected sex, which led to his death from HIV. His dying message was “If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.” There is no mention of the increasing numbers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, mass incarceration and substance abuse that continues to plague the Black community. Eazy’s past as a drug dealer is glamorized, while saying nothing about the rise of homeless workers, rise of substance abuse and the closure of mental institutions that happened during the Reagan era.
Another important part of “reality” left out in the movie is Dr. Dre’s history of violence towards women. His ex-girlfriend (and the mother of his children), Michel’le and the journalist, Dee Barnes, have publicly spoken out about Dre’s history of assaulting women. While occurring during the events of the film, it was never mentioned. The real-life Dr. Dre even went as far as putting out an apologetic statement: “I apologize to the women I’ve hurt...I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all our lives.” This was a statement that was backed up by Apple, who paid Dre $3.2 billion for the Beats headphones and streaming-music companies he co-founded, and currently employs him. While his albums and films receive maximum publicity, his long history of sexist violence against women are swept under the rug, and his sexist portrayals of women in his “reality” music are ignored, as long as his products rake in profits.
NWA’s fame was created by major ruling-class institutions: record labels, distribution networks, MTV, radio stations and more. While the film isn’t shy about showing the record labels’ exploitation of NWA by manipulating the members into bad contracts and the millions made marketing their image for profit, NWA wasn’t spreading revolutionary ideas. They were spewing false consciousness about “making it” — becoming bosses and running their own empires.
In the end, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube become mirror capitalist reflections in the image of the very system that still condemns South Central to mass unemployment, poverty, and drugs. Women play no role in the film, except as sex objects for the main characters. We can’t turn a blind eye when the media impacts our culture and feeds only lies to our working class brothers and sisters! The dehumanization and sexist portrayal of women in this film reveals their justification for sexist violence against them, which is conveniently brushed over or ignored entirely. Straight Outta Compton is nothing but well-marketed garbage straight out of capitalism. It is a betrayal of the masses of workers and youth they dare to claim to still represent.
PLP’s answer is fight back to abolish racism, sexism, nationalism, and our solution is a communist revolution. Along the way we will create our own culture, culture that reflects, is written by, and is about the heroes of rebellions like in LA in 1992 or in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore today. Our anthems will be composed by and for the masses of refugees stuffing into leaky boats and braving barbed wire to reach the safety of other lands. The communist culture we create celebrates our class, rebellion and communist revolution, and celebrates collectivity in its creation and participation. Most importantly, communist culture has no tolerance for pretenders and class enemies like Dr. Dre or Ice Cube.
NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Fast Food Wage Board recently recommended that the state’s minimum wage for fast food workers be raised to $15 per hour. The decision is a big victory for the Fight for Fifteen movement (FF15). But we cannot be fooled. This is a victory not for the working class, but for the liberal bosses.
FF15 is a stage for the liberal faction of the ruling class to try to win the allegiance of fast food workers and pacify them. No doubt, the rebellions over the past year from Ferguson to Baltimore have had a lot to do with this concession. The rulers can’t hope to wage imperialist war and maintain their empire if workers and youth are rebelling in the streets. Terror alone won’t work. So everyone from Cuomo to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Labor Secretary Tom Perez has joined the Fight for Fifteen. With the growing threat of war, the living and working conditions for our class will deteriorate.
The FF15 concession serves another purpose for the bosses: dividing the working class. This concession only includes fast food workers. It excludes retail workers, Emergency Medical Technicians, restaurant workers, and many more who make less than $15/hr. In the current auto contract talks between the United Automobile Workers union and General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, thousands of second-tier Big 3 assembly workers are making $15 or less. In the parts supplier industry, wages are even lower. Many unions, including many Service Employees International Union (SEIU) locals, have been slow to support the campaign because many of their own workers are making less than $15 an hour. Workers are fighting over crumbs when the bosses run away with the whole cake!
Though FF15 is being lauded as a great victory, $15 an hour is only $600 a week before taxes, and not enough to pay the rent and buy groceries. In 1960, the nominal minimum hourly wage was $1, but that is equal to nearly $8 today, after inflation. In fact, the real minimum wage peaked in 1968 at $8.54 an hour (2014 dollars). Since then, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has been falling every year. If it kept pace with increases in productivity, the minimum wage would over $22.
No to Lousy Nickel, Need Hammer and Sickle
Aside from the economics, the bosses are buying our allegiance to capitalism with $15. However much the minimum wage varies, exploitation is an absolute under capitalism. PLP envisions a different kind of society, where the value of labour cannot be stamped with nickels and dimes. We need a system where workers collectively decide what and how to produce, how to distribute it — all based on collectivity, not wages.
This struggle for a higher minimum wage has involved tens of thousands of fast food workers, many supporting families on poverty wages. Black and Latin workers make up 40 percent of the workforce, and 73 percent are women. Along with the recent rebellions and mass marches against the police, this campaign has been one of the main anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles in recent years. Many fast food workers have also been active in the recent mass marches against racist police terror. The cops, the bosses, the state and its politicians are all part of the ruling class. It’s up to communists to link the minimum-wage struggle to the anti-kkkops struggle as one unified fight against capitalism.
We cannot settle for $15/hour. Raising the minimum wage is merely giving workers breadcrumbs when we could have the whole loaf! What we need most of all is to abolish wage slavery with communist revolution and a mass PLP.
The life of Toby “Teddy” Schwartz (1928-2015) reads like a handbook for communists. He was a beloved family member, friend, and comrade. Toby helped to build the Progressive Labor Party and modeled how to win people to its ideas and to organize campaigns of class struggle.
Fighter from the Get-Go
Toby was raised in an immigrant family committed to fighting for workers and social justice. His mother was a seamstress and International Ladies Garment Workers Union organizer, his uncle a Bolshevik. From a young age, Toby committed himself to fighting against capitalism and racism. In 1939, he joined the Young Communist League (YCL), becoming a state youth leader in 1942. Four years later, at 18, he joined with Paul Robeson in the American Youth for Democracy. In his teens, Toby joined the Communist Party (CP-USA). Toby understood that to build an egalitarian world without racism, oppression, or class warfare, one needed to act courageously.
In 1949, as a student at City College of New York (CCNY), Toby helped to lead an anti-racist struggle to fire two racist, anti-Semitic professors. As part of a group of CCNY students led by the YCL, Toby helped to lead a campus-wide strike against racism that eventually involved thousands of students, many of whom had just returned from fighting fascism and racism in Europe during World War II. The resulting weeklong strike shut down the entire campus, a first for a major U.S. college.
Helped Found PLP
During the late 1950s, he and other members of the CP-USA became critical of the party’s politics. After unsuccessfully trying to lead a struggle within the organization to fight for the international working class, Toby joined with a group of 30 who quit the CP in December 1961. Six months later, Toby was among the group of comrades who founded what was to become the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
While working toward his PhD in Buffalo in 1964, Toby was active in a PLP chapter that included steel and auto workers. The fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched a witch-hunt to “rout the radicals.” Toby and others were subpoenaed to appear before HUAC. Many lost their jobs. But they were not silenced; they organized to openly challenge the very right of HUAC to exist. During the hearings, Toby disrupted the proceedings. He grabbed a microphone that was being used to bug the defense table. Soon he was in a grappling match with federal marshals. Three dragged him from the hall. An Associated Press photographer captured the scene and the picture hit front pages across the country. PLP led a counterattack that saw 1,500 students, workers and professors picket the hearings and launch a campaign that drove HUAC from the city and to its eventual demise.
Staunch Anti-Racist Organizer
As a professor, Toby continued to lead struggles to fight for a better world. In 1973, he helped found what later became the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR). In the late 1970s and 1980s, InCAR led a national movement against expansion efforts by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. InCAR’s message of “no free speech for racists — racism hurts all workers” was delivered to hundreds of thousands.
Toby helped to lead this important work throughout New England, meeting the violent tactics of the racists with organized and courageous action. When the KKK attempted to hold a cross burning in the remote rural town of Scotland, Connecticut, Toby led a mass multiracial march of hundreds of workers and students from three states. The demonstrators stopped many Klan sympathizers from attending the cross burning. Not surprisingly, Toby and his family’s livelihood were threatened. Nevertheless, Toby and his wife Helen continued to dedicate their lives to fight for an egalitarian society without racism: communism.
In the 1980s, Toby recruited in the town of Willimantic and helped mount a series of anti-racist campaigns. This was a training ground for developing Party leaders, including a successful struggle to defend a young Puerto Rican man who was targeted for defending himself after a racist gang attack. When local politicians tried to turn a housing project into a gated fascist prison camp, PLP defied racist cops and led demonstrations to defeat it. And when a leading government head publicly slandered Puerto Ricans, PLP’s campaign exposed his racism and forced him out of office!
Toby’s fighting nature helped him recover from a stroke in 1980. He remained active on the University of Connecticut (UConn) campus with InCAR and PLP, leading many a campus-wide anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. These struggles included preventing the UConn administration from closing the two schools on the main campus that had the largest number of women and nonwhite students, a fight to end the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative and other racist and pseudo-scientific research, and campus-wide opposition to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
An Inspiration for Workers
Toby worked to solve problems collectively, rather than relying on charismatic individuals. He would often say, “We don’t believe in the cult of personality. That’s a losing strategy.” At one campus InCAR meeting, a Black woman student and InCAR member stated, “Toby, you have taught me how it’s important to not sit and watch these racist and sexist attacks happen. You taught all of us how to fight back. You also taught us that it’s not enough to just fight racism, but that you have to fight capitalism. That’s why I’m joining PLP.”
Throughout his decades of struggle, Toby was happily married to the love of his life, Helen, until her death in 1999. Together they created a family, raising three children and five grandchildren. Their house was always a place for friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members to gather and share a meal, a glass of wine, and a good discussion of politics and life. They created a household in which lively debate, friendship and compassion were the rule. Everyone was welcome at their table. Their ties created a web of friends across the country and worldwide.
Even in his declining years, Toby made deep connections at his assisted living home. Despite the ravages of dementia and heart disease, Toby lived life to the fullest, attending the opera and taking the train to visit old friends. He was always curious about the world. He and Helen built a library of thousands of books, often processing three or four simultaneously. He wanted to understand how the world worked as well as how people thought and interacted. Toby was a distinguished biophysicist, focused on the specifics of cell membrane transport, and noted for pointing out fundamental principles of thermodynamics.
The kind of fighter he was, and his love for life, became even more evident when Toby entered a hospice, but then fought to recover and return to the home. Then a second entrance to the hospice saw him once again recover to return home! He eventually died there in his sleep.
At his core, Toby believed in the capacity of all people to grow, learn and act, optimistic that our actions can and will create a communist world. Always on the side of the working class, Toby was a militant anti-racist fighter and proud communist, in the true spirit of the word. He never shirked from participating in and leading class struggle.
Toby will live on in all our struggles and in the lessons his life taught us.
Donald Trump’s openly racist presidential campaign is just the latest example of how the capitalist ruling class uses elections to sustain its dictatorship over the working class. From Haiti and Egypt to the United States, competing factions of millionaires and billionaires are sorting out which group will hold state power—and which will be disciplined and suppressed. In addition, the rulers need elections to keep workers tied to the myth that the profit system can be reformed to meet our needs. In the process, these bosses divide the international working class with appeals to racism, sexism, and nationalism. They use stooges like Trump to scapegoat immigrants for mass poverty, unemployment, and the perpetual economic crises caused by the profit system. Capitalism can never serve the working class!
The Progressive Labor Party is fighting back in more than two dozen countries to smash the capitalist class and their electoral farces. Only communist revolution can create a world where workers have a real say over the crucial issues that affect them. Only a communist society—run by and for the working class—can end the nightmare of imperialist war and the mass slaughter of immigrants.
Every politician serves one faction of capitalists or another. In the U.S., the heart of global imperialism, the fight between capitalist factions is heating up. Enter Donald Trump.
A Racist Servant of ExxonMobil
While Bernie Sanders attempts to win over liberal reformists who are disillusioned with eight years of Barack Obama’s empty promises, Trump is busy rallying a different segment of the working class. This group has a deep hatred and distrust of the U.S. federal government, and is vulnerable to being swayed by Trump’s crudely racist and sexist attacks. An the New Yorker magazine (8/31/15) noted, “Ever since the Tea Party’s peak, in 2010, and its fade, citizens on the American far right—Patriot militias, border vigilantes, white supremacists—have searched for a standard-bearer, and now they’d found him.”
But Trump’s greater danger is that he is hardly the renegade outsider he purports to be. His multi-billion-dollar fortune derives from the dominant, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. These bosses, represented by ExxonMobil, Morgan Chase, and mouthpieces like the New York Times, are scrambling to protect their obscene profits in an escalating competition with their imperialist rivals, notably China and Russia. Trump’s “rogue” candidacy has been intensively publicized by the Times. His proposals are both criminally racist and wildly impractical—to deport all 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S., or erect a wall along the entire U.S./Mexican border, or eliminate birthright citizenship. Even so, Trump’s rants could help legitimize more moderate-sounding—but equally racist—Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. They could also galvanize frightened liberals into rallying around an imperialist war-maker like Hillary Clinton.
Currently, the chief dispute among U.S. bosses centers around imperialism. On one side stand the biggest finance capitalists and industrialists, who need to hold on to the Middle East’s energy riches by force. Clinton, Bush, Rubio, Sanders, and Joe Biden all front for this wing, as does Trump. As the Times pointed out (9/1/05), Trump and Bush “are the only leading Republican candidates who have not signed a pledge not to raise taxes.” More specifically, Trump is threatening to raise taxes on greedy hedge fund managers and to close overseas tax loopholes for U.S. corporations—measures that will be needed to fund the broader global war to come.
On the other side are the more domestically oriented bosses, led by Charles and David Koch, who have less to gain from current and projected U.S. wars—or from the corporate taxes required to pay for them. The Koch brothers plan to raise nearly a billion dollars for the 2016 elections, and are still searching for the right candidate to represent them.
Americans for Prosperity, a Koch front group, excluded Trump from its recent “Defending the American Dream” summit because his candidacy originates from the main imperialist camp:
Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House….Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party (Washington Post, 8/5/15).
According to Bloomberg News, a major Wall Street news service:
Failing to win the nomination won’t make Trump electorally irrelevant….His chance of winning the presidency [as an independent] would be poor, but his chances of splitting the conservative vote and helping a Democrat get elected would be good (Bloomberg, 8/24/15).
Even Trump is open about his allegiance to the main U.S. imperialists!
Donald Trump wants to “knock the hell out of” Iraq’s oil fields in order to strike ISIS. And then he wants to take over the oil fields and funnel the profits back to the United States…. [H]e would then send in Exxon or another oil company to quickly rebuild the infrastructure once the conflict is over (CNN, 8/18/15).
Workers’ True Enemy: Imperialism
By his own words, Trump adhere to the Carter Doctrine, the imperialist stance codified by former President Jimmy Carter in 1979: that any threat to U.S. oil interests in the Middle East would be met with a military response. Followed by every U.S. president since, this policy has cost millions of working class lives.
In another token of imperialist loyalty, Trump floated the name of Jack Welch, ex-CEO of the huge military contractor General Electric, as a potential Treasury secretary. It was war-maker GE, through its NBC subsidiary, that catapulted Trump to national fame by running his TV show, “The Apprentice,” for 14 seasons.
The self-styled “independently wealthy” Trump has also offered the Treasury post to his real source of cash, hedge fund billionaire and imperialist tool Carl Icahn. In 2014, a single bond issue left Icahn Enterprises LP in $3.5 billion of debt to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley (Bloomberg, 1/6/14). Icahn bankrolls many of the hideous building projects with the “Trump” name plastered over their entrance.
Don’t Be a Sucker for the Bosses
Workers must not be fooled into falling for Trump’s racist filth. At the same time, it would be a mistake to dismiss his clownish behavior as a circus sideshow. In appearance, capitalist elections in every country are always something of a circus. But it is through them that the bosses conduct their deadly serious business.
PLP organizes workers, students and soldiers worldwide under the slogan, “Don’t Vote, Revolt!” The international working class doesn’t need phony elections or professional politicians to build the world we need. PLP is building an international revolutionary communist movement of millions that will smash all racist borders, smash anti-immigrant and sexist attacks on our sisters and brothers, and smash capitalism once and for all. Join us!
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Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says they are just deportees.
Deportees, by Woody Guthrie, 1948
Capitalists love to point to voting as the height of human achievement. Whenever the bosses ruling the European Union and the United States launch an invasion, they justify their slaughter for profit by claiming they are “spreading democracy.”
Today, the international working class is facing a crisis. Millions of our class sisters and brothers have been displaced by imperialist wars, imperialist-backed civil wars, or capitalist economic crises. Because capitalism deprives workers of real choices, thousands of them brave dangerous journeys to the EU and U.S. in the hope of finding work and surviving. Nearly every day there is another tragic story of immigrating workers killed by this murderous system.
Throughout the world, capitalists are using this crisis to drum up working-class support for more racism and more imperialist war. France’s neo-Nazi National Front, U.S. presidential candidates like Donald Trump, and fake leftist Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro are just a few of the bosses seeking to intensify lethal anti-immigrant racism. In Sweden, where the neo-Nazi party recently polled 25 percent of the electorate, the fascists have proposed a series of laws to prevent desperate immigrants from entering.
Of course, capitalism grants no “right to vote” to millions of immigrant workers worldwide on whether they want to be stuffed into tiny ships, cross hot deserts or suffer abuse from human traffickers.
Communism means workers’ power, no racist borders, and no workers forced from their homes and families to find work. Voting strengthens the dictatorship of capitalism by giving workers the illusion of participation while following the capitalists’ laws. Smashing capitalism for good means building a mass international PLP and a mass Red Army for armed revolution. The road to revolution will break a lot of capitalist laws. As we continue on that path, we must struggle with workers to break with the dangerous notion that voting under capitalism can bring communism any closer.
click to viewSUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN, August 26 — “Tianjin means we got to fight back!” As we responded to the industrial explosion that has killed 158 people in China, hundreds of workers in this mainly Chinese and Latin neighborhood took our leaflets in Chinese and English. Many Latin workers took CHALLENGE in Spanish. Dozens stopped to observe our multiracial group of women and men chanting, “When the working class is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”
This was Progressive Labor Party’s second rally in the neighborhood this week. Workers attentively listened to our speeches in Chinese and English calling for solidarity with protestors in China in the wake of the Tianjin massacre. We connected hazardous working conditions in China to those in the United States. In this neighborhood, one of three people live below the poverty line. Whether they are in Ferguson, Brooklyn, or Tianjin, workers have everything to gain by uniting to smash capitalism.
Murder, Not Accident
On August 12, two dangerous and toxic chemical warehouses owned by Rui Hai Logistics exploded near the port city of Tianjin. The death toll is still rising. It left thousands more injured, homeless, exposed to future health problems, or missing. The explosion also damaged 17,000 homes. Since then, in Shandong, a Runxing Chemical Technology Co. factory has also exploded.
The capitalist media has called the explosion in Tianjin a number of things: tragedy, industrial accident, disaster. But the working class can see Tianjin for what it is: capitalist murder. The government, businesses, and environmental academics all knew about the dangers of this chemical industry as early as 2008! But the lives of workers are expendable under capitalism, and their deaths a calculated risk the bosses gladly take in this “thriving economic development zone” (New York Times, 8/31). The port in Tianjin is the fourth largest in the world, with nearly 500 million tons of cargo passing through it each year. It connects 500 other ports in 180 countries.
Surely a port that reports over $104 million (USD) in annual profits—and a Chinese government that invests $145 billion in its military—could have a few dollars left over for safety measures for workers? No, not under capitalism, where workers are treated as commodities and used to churn profit. Tianjin and Shandon are but two of the latest atrocities of a system that is based on the exploitation of workers. We need a world based on our needs and run by workers, not bosses and their drive for profit.
No Good Bosses
While the western capitalist media like the British Broadcasting Corporation and the New York Times are quick to blast imperialist rival China for putting “profits over people,” they don’t dare point fingers at their own rulers’ murderous exploitation. What was their bosses’ response? John Deere and Toyota are closing their factories near Tianjin. (Read: Unemployment and poverty for workers.) Other companies like Wal-Mart are “monitoring the situation” in their facilities in Tianjin.
The international working class must respond to these explosions. We must shut the bosses’ profit system down. Whether in Mexico or the U.S., in Nepal or Syria, workers know too well the devastation this profit system wreaks on their lives: racism, sexism, unemployment, deportation, deadly infrastructure, murders by the state, inter-imperialist war. That’s why today we chanted, “Asian, Latin, Black, and white, workers of the world unite!”
We Can Make a Better World
Workers once ruled China and developed a system that valued the health and safety of working women and men. The Chinese Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution raised the living standards of the masses, from mass literacy to mass health care and education. In the span of ten years, workers doubled their life expectancy and cut the infant mortality rate in half! The gains communists made with women workers were commendable. The sexist practices of arranged marriage, foot binding, illiteracy, prostitution, and female infanticide were eradicated. This was possible only under a worker-run society. While the Chinese Revolution fought for socialism, Progressive Labor Party has learned from the old movement and fights directly for communism.
With the return of full-fledged capitalism, workers in China and worldwide are suffering under horrendous economic and political burdens. In China alone, nearly 70,000 people died while working with toxic chemicals last year (truth-out.org). What does the working class have to look forward to? More capitalist mass murders and an eventual world war among rivals like China, the U.S., and Russia.
The working class has no stake in Chinese or U.S. bosses. Join PLP to create a different future for our class. Let’s build a worldwide communist movement where the health and lives of workers is the order of the day. We can make a better world!
