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Birth of New Communist Movement — PL Sparks Class War
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- 30 July 2015 207 hits
Since May 6, we have been publishing articles in celebration of PLP’s 50th anniversary. These articles describe the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers and why the fight against racism is of strategic importance in the fight to overthrow capitalism. Here we will review our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba, and the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
PLM Leads the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In the early 1960s, class struggle was heating up. The U.S. bosses embarked on a genocidal war in Vietnam. The leadership shown by the working class in Vietnam after decades of resistance to French imperialism inspired millions of workers worldwide. Black workers led rebellions in almost every major U.S. city and rocked the capitalist class back on its heels. In the midst of intensifying class struggle in March 1964, a Yale University conference on socialism was attended by many pseudo-left organizations, including the “Communist” Party USA and various Trotskyite groups. The conference was geared for a scholarly debate on theory. Only PLM broke through this nonsense to advocate building a militant anti-imperialist movement!
PLM leader Milt Rosen electrified the audience of 500 students and faculty by focusing on opposing U.S. imperialism’s efforts to crush the revolutionary movement in Vietnam. He called for a nation-wide mobilization on May 2 to protest U.S. aggression there. The proposal was approved overwhelmingly and a May 2nd Committee was organized under PLM’s leadership.
On May 2, thousands of workers and students marched and rallied in cities nationwide. In New York City, 1,000 heard PL speeches about the necessity for communist revolution. They broke a police ban on demonstrations in midtown Manhattan, winding their way through Times Square to the United Nations, demanding: “U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!” It was the first national demonstration against the U.S. imperialist invasion and the forerunner of countless protests against U.S. rulers in the years ahead.
The Committee became a national organization called the May 2nd Movement (M2M). Hundreds joined. They played a major role in popularizing the struggle against U.S. imperialism’s war against workers and peasants in Vietnam. They issued hundreds of thousands of leaflets, buttons and pamphlets; initiated numerous university teach-ins; organized rallies and marches; and developed “Free Universities” as an off-campus alternative to the rulers’ educational system.
Following a massive Washington, D.C. anti-war rally of 25,000 organized by Students for A Democratic Society (SDS) in the spring of 1965, PLM’s leadership fought inside M2M to dissolve it and join SDS, a move supported by the overwhelming majority within M2M.
M2M did play a vanguard role in opposing U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam and successfully broke with the old pacifist “peace movement” dominated by the Communist Party USA. That movement was never anti-imperialist but rather championed ruling-class collaboration behind slogans like “Ban the Bomb”; “Peaceful Co-existence”; and “For A Sane Nuclear Policy” — as if the working class could ever make peace with imperialist rulers! PL’s slogan--“U.S. Get Out of Vietnam Now!”—was eventually adopted by millions.
M2M helped move the emerging anti-war forces to the left and toward anti-imperialism. Many youthful fighters joined PLM, having learned from their mass struggles in the M2M.
Breaking the Cuba Travel Ban
Although Cuba eventually became a state capitalist country, the Cuban Revolution of the early 1960s had great appeal for youth in the U.S., and especially for Black and Latin workers. U.S. imperialist rulers feared the Cuban revolt would spark similar uprisings throughout Latin America and radicalize U.S. workers and students. President Kennedy’s CIA-directed Bay of Pigs invasion had failed miserably.
Prior to that invasion, PLM distributed tens of thousands of leaflets and held streets rallies warning about Kennedy’s plans. It even unfurled the first “Hands Off Cuba” banner in the galleries of the United Nations during the UN debate over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a crisis that aroused fears of a nuclear war.
After Cuba confiscated a billion dollars worth of U.S corporate property, the Kennedy Administration instituted an economic boycott of Cuba and established a ban on travel there. While other pseudo-left groups merely reprinted Castro’s speeches, PLM boldly announced they would break the travel ban.
Over 500 students applied to the PLM-led Ad Hoc Committee to Travel to Cuba to defy the U.S. State Department. Seventy-five were selected. In the summer of 1963, the Committee outwitted a government plan to block them and flew to Cuba via Czechoslovakia. The trip succeeded; 59 students broke the “Kennedy curtain.” It was reported in headlines nationwide. Attorney General Robert Kennedy condemned the organizers and promised to punish them.
Upon returning to New York, in a showdown at the airport, immigration officials tried to seize the ban-breakers’ passports, mark them “invalid” and refuse their entry back into the U.S., based on a 1918 law to control the travel of spies for Germany’s kaiser during World War I. The students refused to surrender their passports and sat down in the airport. Hundreds of family members and supporters were waiting nearby, along with newspaper and TV reporters. The standoff lasted two hours. Finally the agents gave in, allowing the students to enter while serving them with letters revoking their passports.
The pro-fascist New York Daily News ran a front-page photo of the students cheering as they came through immigration barriers, along with a headline scorecard: “PUNKS 1, STATE DEPARTMENT 0!”
Within weeks, more than 50 students were either cited for contempt or indicted for conspiracy to break the ban. Some faced 20-year prison terms, but the government’s attack failed miserably. A national defense campaign won widespread support. Most of the young PLM comrades and friends held firm and grew stronger in their commitment to fight the rulers. They announced they were organizing another trip to Cuba! The following year, almost a thousand students applied; 84 were selected and again broke the ban.
Afterward, four student committee leaders were indicted for illegal travel to Cuba. After a two-year fight, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, the charges were dropped. The ban had been beaten. Many students who had participated in the trips or supported them joined PLM, which emerged as a vigorous force in the emerging New Left in the U.S. The Cuba trips were a decisive turning point for PLM. As a head-on challenge to President Kennedy’s State Department travel ban, as well as a demonstration of solidarity with the working class in Cuba, they were a huge success — groundbreaking events in the development of student radicalism in the 1960s.
Wiping Out HUAC
In 1963, when the first group of students returned from Cuba after breaking the travel ban, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched an anti-communist attack by summoning many of them to hearings in Washington in an attempt to intimidate and possibly jail them. Until then, the Committee had focused on asking Hollywood stars, Communist Party USA leaders and others if they were communists. Virtually all took refuge in the 5th Amendment, citing their constitutional right to refuse to answer. HUAC’s strategy was to cite them for contempt and threaten jail terms. The famous “Hollywood Ten” were imprisoned for up to a year.
CPUSA leaders “took the 5th,” posing as “defenders of the Constitution and of democracy.” No one ever answered the question directly. If they said “no,” the Committee would haul in some stoolpigeon to testify that they were communists. If they said that they once had been communists but had quit, the Committee would then ask them to name others they knew to be communists. It was a lose-lose proposition, but PLM changed the game.
While hundreds picketed outside, PL’ers took the stand and answered by declaring: “Yes, we are communists and proud of it!” This set HUAC members back on their heels; they weren’t prepared for that answer. It represented PL’s principle of openly advocating socialism, the term used prior to PLP’s proclaiming a direct goal of communism.
In April 1964, HUAC descended on Buffalo, where PLM had established an industrial and campus base. The Committed prattled on about a “threat of a new communist movement” that “needed to be dealt with.” A Buffalo Courier-Express headline clarified HUAC’s aim: “New Communist Operation Here A Prime Target.”
But in sharp contrast to the CPUSA’s defensive stance, PLM launched an all-out offensive; 1,500 pickets greeted the anti-communist red-baiters. The University of Buffalo Student Senate appropriated funds to support the protest. The entire city was in an uproar. Front-page headlines screamed: “Red Probers in Buffalo Hear the Sound of Fury”; “Witnesses Spark Uproar, Grapple With Marshals”; “UB Instructor Ridicules HUAC”; “Rain-Soaked Pickets’ Chants Echo Outside HUAC Session.” The demonstrators were supported by various mass groups, some printing full-page ads in the Buffalo paper. Clerics joined the picket line.
The hearings were completely disrupted. HUAC fled town. PL’s principle of confronting anti-communism directly and organizing mass support, rather than hiding behind the bosses’ Constitution, proved decisive.
In 1966, HUAC launched an investigation of “subversive activities” in the anti-war movement, subpoenaing many, including five student members of PL. The Party mobilized 800 protestors to pack the Washington, D.C. hearing room to disrupt the proceedings while also demonstrating outside Congress. They exposed the racist HUAC as Nazis, turning the hearings into an attack on capitalism and on the liberal Johnson Administration, accusing it of mass murder in Vietnam and racist policies in the U.S.
That was the last straw. Three years of bold PL actions led to HUAC’s demise as an official Congressional committee.
From our beginning, PL has stood at the forefront of attacking racism and imperialism, fighting back against every attack the bosses can throw at it. The lessons of all these struggles are that it’s necessary to anticipate ruling-class attacks and develop alternative plans to defeat them. <any different avenues of struggle must be employed to smash the bosses. Dare to struggle! Dare to win! Be bold! Always be guided by the principle of acting in the best interests of the working class. Grow stronger through struggle. Ruling-class terror will never destroy the communist movement.
When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.
-Bertolt Brecht, A German War Primer
Around the planet, the potential for global war among imperialists is escalating—and with it the threat of devastation for the international working class. At the moment, the Russian rulers loom as the U.S. bosses’ sharpest rivals. As Russia pursues an undeclared war with NATO ally Ukraine and moving nuclear-capable weapons near NATO borders, the Pentagon prepares to mobilize heavy weaponry and up to 5,000 troops in the Baltic states and former Eastern Bloc. Tensions between the two imperialist powers are higher than at any time since the Cold War. Seeking both battlefield superiority and game-changing alliances, they seem to be on a collision course.
Imperialist war is essential to capitalism. Rival capitalists must either expand their profit-making empires or fall to one of their rivals, a competition that creates constant instability and periodic crises. Each day, even during “peacetime,” this grow-or-die behavior devastates hundreds of millions of workers. It will end only when millions throughout the world join and help to lead a mass Progressive Labor Party, and to smash this racist, sexist, and imperialist profit system with armed communist revolution.
The Russians Are Coming
When Barack Obama nominated General Joe Dunford to be chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, it reflected the imperialist needs of the biggest U.S. capitalists. According to the Wall Street Journal (7/10/15), Dunford told Congress:
Russia poses the biggest threat to U.S. national security….Amid potential threats that include China, Islamic State, Iranian influence across the Middle East and other challenges...If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, you’d have to point to Russia,” Gen. Dunford said….North Korea, China and Islamic State are what he ranks as the second, third and fourth among potential security challenges.
Dunford’s remarks echoed those made the same day by a leading bank for U.S. imperialism. As Business Insider reported (7/10/15):
The Russia-NATO confrontation is becoming one of the defining aspects of the global strategic landscape. And according to the head of Goldman Sachs’s Office of Global Security, the situation is going to remain tense — or even intensify. Robert Dannenberg, who is also a 24-year CIA veteran, believes that Russia is the top strategic threat from a U.S. perspective. “We are in an extraordinarily dangerous time right now because both Russia and NATO are starting to exercise substantial military activity in close proximity to each other.”
While military buildups by both sides in Europe are heavily publicized, it’s less well known that “U.S. Army Alaska troops…have been taking part in a massive training exercise stretching from Alaska to Australia. Training exercise Talisman Saber involves over 33,000 military personnel from three continents” (Alaska Public Media, 7/10/15). This U.S.-led rehearsal targets both Russia and China with “airborne operations…uncommon…since World War II…The goal is to be able to drop an instant fighting force on the other side of the world within 24 hours” (APM).
Courting India
While U.S. rulers are glad to have Australia as a coalition partner, their bigger wish is to count India and its billion-plus population as an ally. But the bosses of Russia and China may have a better offer for India’s bosses. BRICS, an anti-U.S. economic coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, recently founded its own bank to challenge the U.S.-backed IMF and World Bank. As the imperialists in Russia court allies of their own, BRICS is also developing a military alliance.
India is set to become a full-fledged member of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian political and military alliance that includes China and most of Central Asia, Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday.
“Under your (Putin’s) leadership in BRICS, India has become a member of SCO. I am very grateful,” the [Indian] prime minister said (Gulf Times, 7/9/15).
Unite Soldiers, Workers, Students
Another challenge to the U.S. rulers’ global war schemes comes from within, and it is one that PLP members and friends can use to our advantage. While regular U.S. army troops rehearse a European invasion with large-scale tank exercises at Fort Riley, Kansas, U.S. Special Forces are practicing a counterinsurgency Operation “Jade Helm” at bases throughout the U.S. Southwest. Many workers in the Southwest furiously oppose Jade Helm as an attempt to impose Ferguson-style federal martial law. States like Texas, Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, and the Carolinas provide U.S. rulers with the bulk of their enlisted cannon fodder. Many of these soldiers are white workers temporarily under the influence of racism and false ideologies like libertarianism. These bad ideas obscure the real source of their suffering: capitalism.
There is more immediate opportunity, however, in the hundreds of thousands of GIs who reject the Obama/Bush/Clinton/Exxon/JP Morgan/Goldman agenda for imperialist war and fascist control at home. By focusing its organizing efforts on students, industrial workers and soldiers, PLP is the one force capable of uniting these GIs with U.S. workers in the South and Southwest who are frustrated by mass unemployment, and with working-class Black, Latin and immigrant class sisters and brothers who face intensifying racist terror.
All the elections in the world cannot settle the imperialists’ disputes. The wars to come will be more devastating than any the world has ever seen. World War I and World War II were both settled by revolutions led by communists. PLP is building an international mass movement of millions to finish the job and smash the capitalist profit system once and for all. Join us!
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The hot-button subject in the Dominican Republican is the racist “hunt for Haitians.” The current attack, reminiscent of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre” of up to 50,000 Haitian sugar cane workers, has led to the deportation of 40,000 people to Haiti in the first quarter of 2015 alone (Guardian, 6/16/15). As workers are expelled or flee in terror, they move from capitalist oppression in the DR to what is often an even worse plight in Haiti. They are the living proof that national borders serve only the capitalist ruling class.
PLP, our international communist party, has joined anti-racist struggles in support of our Haitian sisters and brothers, both here and the U.S. In Brooklyn, PLP connected the racist deportations in DR to the racist deportations and killings of Black and Latin youth in the U.S. In Port-au-Prince, comrades held demonstrations and conferences attacking the racist bosses on both sides of the island of Hispaniola.
KKKourts Ordain Racism
In 2013, the DR bosses’ highest court broke their own constitution to withdraw citizenship from tens of thousands of people born in the Dominican since 1929 to migrant parents. The new law was blatantly aimed at workers of Haitian descent, who represent 80 percent of the so-called foreign population.
While the court ruling was later modified by the national legislature, the Dominican ruling class continues to use the state apparatus to blame workers of Haitian heritage for mounting unemployment—the perpetual crisis of capitalism. Anti-Haitian racism also serves as a smokescreen for corruption charges against present and past DR governments. Most damaging of all, it divides the working class along nationalist lines.
Two Flags, Same Exploitation
In both the DR and Haiti, workers have lined up behind their respective bosses’ flags, a sure disaster. Appeals to nationalism and racism are the bosses’ main weapon to sow disunity within our class. Haitian workers are super-exploited by Dominican bosses on both sides of the island, from agricultural and construction workers in the DR to factory workers in free-trade-zone shops owned by Dominican-Haitian capitalist partnerships. And these same Dominican bosses exploit Dominican workers on “their side” of the island.
Meanwhile, thousands of more recent Haitian immigrants have fled the DR “voluntarily,” not daring to wait for more brutality. In some cases, their documents proving legal residence were torn up in front of them by soldiers and immigration agents. Others, in the DR for decades and with children and grandchildren born there, are anxiously waiting; they have few remaining ties to Haiti and speak only Spanish.
The Haitian government has done nothing about this crisis. Recently, their ministers met at the Royal Oasis, one of five luxury hotels built since the 2010 earthquake in the capital’s suburbs—with money that should have gone to housing for the earthquake’s victims. The ministers’ big plan was to set up a handful of tents in the border areas to receive refugees from the DR crisis. Much like the earthquake victims, these refugees have no jobs, no services, no hope.
Teaching Nationalist Poison
The Dominican and Haitian ruling classes are in competition to profit off the backs of workers. In the DR, the bosses’ education system is riddled with racism. It poisons working-class children with the nationalist myth that people of Haitian descent are to blame for all the ills of their society. For their part, the Haitian bosses and their politicians do their best to keep the working class in the dark with barely functioning schools. Dominican workers are taught to persecute Haitian workers, while Haitian workers are taught that they are hated by Dominicans and should respond in kind. The workers’ natural class hatred toward the bosses is subverted by racism and division.
Whether in the DR or Haiti, the local ruling classes—backed by imperialist powers like the U.S.—could not care less about workers’ deaths and dislocation. Their only concern is to make more profit. For Haitian workers, the attack is doubled. In addition to laboring under subhuman conditions for miserable wages (earning 50 to 60 percent less than Dominicans for the same work), and experiencing racist humiliation on a daily basis, they may be hanged, burned alive, lynched or shot. Historically, these atrocities have broken out whenever tensions rise between the two countries’ rulers. Haitian bosses invest their capital in the DR, while Dominican bosses make their bread and butter in both Haiti and the DR.
Communism Will Smash All Borders
As long as nationalism, individualism, selfishness and capitalist inequality exist, racism will flourish. The capitalists will use it as a weapon to divide and dominate the working class. Racism obstructs the unity of the working class. This is why communists in Progressive Labor Party fight against racism and sexism in thought and deed. We organize to build communist consciousness in anti-racist struggles. We struggle for a world of equality. Smash racism and nationalism! Fight for communism!
PAKISTAN, July 15 — Pakistan is moving along a bloody path established by the capitalist bosses for their long- and short-term interests. The bosses need fear, chaos and unrest in the country to keep the working class silent on their exploitation and poverty. The bosses pit workers against each other by using nationalism, fundamentalism, sexism, racism and the false concept of ethnicity. Women workers are super-exploited, earning little or no pay and often working under subhuman conditions. All of these divisions are an attempt to circumvent our unity. PLP is fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses.
Racist Massacres
The recent massacre of Pakhtoons (pashtuns) in Baluchistan, where about 40 working-class travellers were killed brutally after being abducted from two public busses, is another attempt by the bosses to generate perpetual violence. Baluchistan has two main ethnic groups, the Baluchs and Pakhtoons, that lived together peacefully for many years. After killing thousands of innocent working-class people in the name of religion, the imperialist bosses and their puppets launched a new strategy in Baluchistan: to divide these two groups. Baluch separatists, funded by imperialist bosses, executed the killings. PLP asserts that nationalism is a tool used by imperialism to further the bosses’ interests throughout the world.
In 2015, 30 Baluchistan coal miners were killed by terrorists while sleeping in tents in Turbat, Baluchistan. These miners work hard to produce profit for bosses without any safety equipment and with outmoded, dangerous techniques. After this heinous attack, it was proved that security personnel aided the terrorists.
In Karachi, more than 250 workers were burned alive in a Bladia town garment factory after the factory owners refused to pay extortion money to a racist political party. Soon after that barbaric act, the culprit was arrested by some brave security officials, but his affiliation with the party was suppressed. Bosses are always protecting each other one way or another.
Capitalist bosses need profit, above all. By avoiding direct clashes with nationalist and religious terrorists that might threaten their investments, the bosses are protecting their money at the cost of workers’ lives. They are also giving funds and support to the nationalist and religious terrorists because they want to keep oppressing and killing workers.
Capitalism breads nationalism, sexism, racism, fundamentalism and ethnic divisions to keep workers from uniting. Elections are used to deepen these divisions.
We cannot get rid of all these capitalist evils without uniting workers worldwide for an international communist revolution. We know that capitalism has to die. Let us struggle hard under the red banner of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party to make communism a reality.
TEL AVIV, July 10 — Workers here are waging a fight against contract work and demanding direct employment, a boss-worker relationship without an intermediary agency that pay substandard wages. PLP’s involvement in this reform struggle can help win workers to communist politics.
A group of contract workers and fighters of the National Coalition for Direct Employment walked through downtown Tel Aviv, marking the pavement with chalk in front of businesses and government offices that employ contract workers. Several PL’ers, one of whom is active in the Coalition, took part in the activity.
On June 18, we also rode the train from Be’er Sheva to Haifa and back, talking with passengers and showing videos about the contract workers’ plight. The response was enthusiastic. Most passengers were strongly opposed to the capitalist practice of contract employment. Most fighters in the Coalition were social work students and their teachers. Instead of merely discussing the horrors of capitalism inside class, they came out to the streets to challenge this exploitation.
Contract labor is a relatively new form of super-exploitation of workers, first emerging in the late 1980’s after “structural adjustments”—that is, big cutbacks by the racist Israeli bosses. A contractor boss — a wage-slave trader — hires workers, typically for minimum wage or a little more, and rents them out to various businesses and government offices. This outsourcing is designed to cut costs at the workers’ expense. A contract worker rarely gets even those minimal rights prescribed by the bosses’ laws. In addition, contract labor enables bosses to deny responsibility for dangerous and miserable working conditions.
Capitalism Dehumanizes Workers
Contract work, like all wage labor under capitalism, is a way for bosses to dehumanize workers and treat them as commodities. But contract work also is a way to break organized labor and to give the lowest possible pay for the most work they can squeeze out of us. Both the actual employer and the contractor make big profits while we workers pay the contractors to exploit us. That is why the Coalition came to shame these exploiters and mark them in public as the wage-slave owners they are. Of course, the bosses’ state intervened. City Hall enforcement cops fined some of us, but we paid the fine and continued to mark the pavements in front of the businesses.
Fightback is important for building working-class consciousness in Israel-Palestine. The big strength of the Coalition is its inclusive nature. It treats all people as comrades and partners for change. But it does have weaknesses, mainly its reformist focus on changing contract employment to direct employment. It fails to recognize that all work under capitalism is exploitative.
Inside the Coalition, we are building a base and putting forward revolutionary communist politics. Exploitation can be smashed only by a communist revolution. The bosses’ murderous profit system must be replaced by a workers’ state, where we the working class will run society. Friends in the Coalition want our class to work with dignity. For that, we need communism. Through this struggle, we are winning workers to join PLP.
