In May 2014, Ras Baraka was elected mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Many workers here, particularly black workers, saw this as a step forward in the fight against racism and toward the liberation of the working class. But diverting workers’ energy into electing anyone to office, no matter how “left” they may seem, is a recipe for selling out the struggle to smash racism and exploitation. Whether the bosses’ local figurehead is Baraka in Newark or Bill DeBlasio in New York City, the bourgeois electoral system is controlled by the capitalist class. We can’t elect our way to a society that serves workers’ needs. Only a communist revolution can smash the bosses’ class tyranny.
Ras Baraka is no stranger to Newark politics. He is the son of recently deceased Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones), a famous poet and critic and a very popular local figure. Ras Baraka first ran for mayor in 1994, when he was 24. He was elected to the Newark Municipal Council twice and was appointed deputy mayor by the openly corrupt and now disgraced Sharpe James administration.
In 1971, Amiri Baraka was a key figure in the nationalist National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. One of the goals of the NBPC was to elect black politicians, including Kenneth Gibson, Newark’s first black mayor. The elder Baraka later regretted his endorsement of Gibson and proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist. But this contradicts the fact that he never broke with nationalism. In 2008, he justified his support of Barack Obama as part of the struggle for a “people’s democratic united front” against Republican Party-led fascism. He attacked those who — like Progressive Labor Party — saw Obama as the main danger to the working class, calling them “infantile” leftists.
How Booker and Christie Elected Baraka
Ras Baraka’s campaign slogan was, “When I become mayor, you become mayor.” He beat Shavar Jeffries, who was backed by the same Wall Street interests and school reform organizations that elevated U.S. Senator Cory Booker, a former Newark mayor. Booker, a strong supporter of charter schools, teamed with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to devise the secret “One Newark,” a plan to privatize the state-controlled Newark public schools and close many of them in the process. Christie then appointed Cami Anderson, a reform hack, as superintendent of Newark’s schools.
In 2013, mass anger against the racist profiteers making a bundle off of One Newark turned into a mass campaign involving students, parents and teachers. By the time Booker was elected to the U.S. Senate, many Newark residents saw through him. They understood that both Booker and Jeffries were bought-and-paid-for servants of Zuckerberg, local bosses like Prudential Insurance, and the hedge fund managers behind the latest education reform scheme.
Christie told Newark residents that he didn’t “care about the community criticism” of Cami Anderson because “[w]e run the school district in Newark, not them” (Newark Star-Ledger, 9/5/13). Many were furious at Christie’s arrogance and the blatant racism behind mass school closings. Baraka’s campaign exploited this anger to push to regain “local control” of the schools. As the principal at Newark’s Central High School and city councilman for the South Ward, Baraka became a leader of the struggle to stop One Newark. Campaign ads touted him as the mayor who would “stand up” to Christie.
Capitalist Baraka’s Lies
Toward the end of the mayoral campaign, in response to several high-profile local shootings, New Jersey’s acting attorney general announced the deployment of dozens of state troopers in Newark, as requested by the city’s acting mayor, Luis Quintana. According to the Star-Ledger (4/17/14), the move “was met with praise” by both Jeffries and Baraka. A similar deployment in Irvington, New Jersey, had led to increased harassment of black workers, including more frequent use of stop-and-frisk.
After getting elected, Baraka revealed that Booker had left the city with a significant budget deficit. Baraka used this crisis as an excuse to approach Christie about increased state aid for Newark. Of course, any money forked over by Christie comes with strings attached. According to a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, “It appears the City is requesting [state] supervision” of the city budget” (Star-Ledger, 7/20/14). Baraka told the Star-Ledger: “We gonna do a little Martin Luther King. We gonna wear [Christie] down with love.”
This fall, when parents and students organized a schools boycott to stop One Newark, Baraka told them he couldn’t be a cheerleader for the boycott. When students organized by the Newark Students Union sat down in the street in front of Anderson’s office, the Newark cops (who answer to Baraka) arrested and injured a student leader who had chained herself to a light pole.
Among the organizations supporting the schools boycott is New Jersey Communities United (NJCU), a liberal group tied to union leadership. At the height of the mass struggle against One Newark last spring, NJCU called on students and others to redirect their energies into the Baraka mayoral campaign. Instead of organizing the fired-up masses into direct confrontation with the racist capitalist system promoted by Anderson, Booker and Christie, the Baraka campaign dissipated that anger.
Baraka’s platform of restoring “local control” promotes the illusion that workers can curb racism under capitalism. For the working class, nothing less than violent revolution to overthrow capitalist dictatorship can bring an egalitarian, anti-racist world.
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Blacklisted: Communist Movement Must Create Its Own Culture
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- 13 November 2014 171 hits
Blacklisted by G.A Davis is a novel and a mystery….but really, it’s much more. As its sub title says, it focuses on “A Family Targeted by McCarthy.” It’s about working-class people and their community. It’s an exciting read for those who know about this period as well as for those who’ve never heard of McCarthy’s anti-communist witchhunts.
BUT…this is a novel, not an historical text. The central character and narrator is a high school student, 15-year-old Josie, who grew up in a left-wing, political and active union family. 
Josie’s Uncle Victor is a public figure in post-war Seattle, a long-time union organizer and fighter for the working class of every heritage, “race” and ethnicity. The novel takes place in the early 1950s when Victor is subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC.) The family is under intense FBI harassment. Unexpectedly, Victor dies in suspicious circumstances.
From then on, the novel’s main tension is Josie’s search for answers. How and why did her Uncle Victor die? Where is his missing death certificate? She emerges as an independent and critical thinker.
Josie’s family is interwoven with hundreds who respected them and acted on that respect as the family crisis grows. As Josie says “Seattle is a small town”:
There are union officials and active members who are integrated in the family’s life and help protect Josie from the police and FBI.
Mrs. Fujimoto, the vegetable seller at the market, refuses to take money from Josie’s Aunt. It’s “a donation to Victor.” Turns out, Josie’s Aunt and Mrs. Fujimoto have discussed the Japanese internment and the confiscation of the Fujimoto family farm during World War II.
Josie meets international figures like Paul Robeson as he sings at the border of the U.S. and Canada in 1952.
Josie also moves in a teenage world of high school friends, flirting and love interests. She goes to parties and sneaks into dance halls. She and her circle identify with emerging blues, jazz and early spoken word. She helps organize her friends to ridicule the principal at Garfield High for his racism.
Blacklisted is engaging on every level: characters, culture, mystery, relations among family and friends and historical context. The story helps the reader figure out what created these folks. It lets you see for yourself contradictions in individuals and society when massive pressure comes down from the government apparatus to try to maintain the existing order.
Historical Background
Blacklisted presents a political, social and cultural fabric of Seattle after World War II. The strands were created in the 1920s and 1930s. That was a period of battles for unionization among longshore, logging, cannery and other workers. There were fights against Jim Crow racism and for integration. There was a general strike in Seattle in 1919 and a movement to stop ships transporting arms to the enemies of the Russian Revolution. Internationalism, the fight for socialism and against fascism were real in peoples’ lives. Cultural change such as WPA (Works Progress Administration) murals, blues, jazz, and be-bop bubbled up from below in the post-war spread of African American culture.
These were battles where immigrant and U.S.-born members of the IWW (International Workers of the World) and the Communist Party of the USA played both leading and rank-and-file roles. Josie’s family lives in this context. Their life is made from this whole cloth.
What You Do Counts
PLP members and friends could introduce Blacklisted to a wide audience. It could be great reading for social studies, literature, sociology, labor or other classes in high school and college. Readers can learn much about a period omitted from the history books while engaging in the lives of people struggling for equality and a better life.
You can read Blacklisted to find out that “What you do counts,” counts in big ways like class struggle that challenges existing power relations and counts in smaller, less known, ways like how you live your life and immerse yourself with others. This book helps you imagine just who you can count on when you participate in the struggle for a more collective, communist world. It’s a breath of fresh air in today’s mass culture of cynicism.
As the title says, this is a story about your family, your neighbors, your coworkers and fellow students; people fighting back against massive attack. This story won’t be embraced in mainstream culture. We have to create our own. So, read and distribute the book.
For the working class of West Africa, Ebola is a crisis. But for U.S. imperialists, the viral outbreak is an opportunity — to extend their military influence, expand their domestic war powers, and fuel the racism that exploits and divides workers throughout the world. U.S. rulers are using Ebola to accelerate their move to fascism, the stage of capitalism where the veneer of social democracy gives way to the naked reality of the bosses’ dictatorship. Only by imposing fascism on the working class can the rulers militarize the U.S. and prepare for the global war to come. Only through fascism can they hope to stave off the challenge of imperialist rivals like China and Russia. 
From cholera in Haiti to hurricanes in New Orleans or New Jersey, “natural” disasters are in fact caused by capitalism. The bosses’ drive for profits — the essence of the capitalist system — leads them to neglect infrastructure: roads, bridges, sea walls. When medical breakthroughs fail to promise a high return on investment, they get ignored. On October 23, the New York Times reported that scientists in the U.S. and Canada had discovered a vaccine that was “100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus” — nearly a decade ago. With adequate funding, the life-saving product might have been licensed and in use by 2010. Instead, it sat on the shelf.
As Adrian Hill, co-director of Oxford University’s vaccine program, told the Independent (9/7/14):
Well, who makes vaccines? Today, commercial vaccine supply is monopolised by four or five mega-companies — GSK, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer — some of the biggest companies in the world.
“The problem with that is, even if you’ve got a way of making a vaccine, unless there’s a big market, it’s not worth the while of a mega-company …. There was no business case to make an Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most …. It’s a market failure.
Even now, as overblown panic in developed countries has triggered a push for a vaccine, U.S. bosses have no incentive or plan to relieve workers from the miseries of capitalism. To date, Ebola has afflicted about 10,000 people in West Africa. Hundreds of thousands more are fleeing the outbreak and its economic dislocation. But despite the scale of this suffering, it pales next to the malnutrition that is “directly or indirectly responsible for 3.5 million child deaths every year, in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to the United Nations. From 1992 to 2012, the World Hunger Education Service noted, “the number of hungry grew in Africa … from 175 million to 239 million.”
Africa’s deadliest scourge is starvation, essentially death by poverty and the profit system.
Oil and M-16s
U.S. bosses and their puppet, President Barack Obama, are using Ebola to get the jump on China and Russia in exploiting oil and gas reserves in the affected region. ExxonMobil, Chevron and Anadarko Petroleum all have offshore operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where reserves have been estimated in excess of one billion barrels (Reuters Africa, 11/03/09). It’s likely no coincidence that Obama is sending in thousands of troops: “The U.S. military presence in West Africa [now 900] is expected … to climb to 3,900 in coming weeks” (Washington Post, 10/26/14). Meanwhile, a public relations competition is in full swing. As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, pointed out:
The United States pledged $350 million [to a UN Ebola aid fund]; the UK has committed $200 million.... Chinese and Russian donations have been notably low: China has pledged around $50 million and Russia has contributed $1 million (CFR website, 10/24/14).
Foreign aid is a basic tool of imperialism. France is contributing $88 million to the Ebola cause to re-colonize Guinea, a former possession. Britain is focused on its former colony, Sierra Leone. Liberia — founded by ex-slaves deported by U.S. racists and home to a vast Firestone rubber plantation — occupies Washington’s attention.
How the Bosses Use Ebola
Domestically, Ebola helps U.S. imperialists planning for a potential World War III by furnishing grounds for tighter, more militarized government control, especially of people’s movements. Several states have enforced quarantines of healthy medical workers returning from West Africa. In addition, Obama “has ordered the Department of Defense to form a 30-member military medical quick strike team that can deploy quickly — within 72 hours — to any new outbreaks of Ebola in the U.S.” (Global Research, 10/23/14).
By contrast, the capitalist health system has virtually no plan in place to treat Ebola in U.S. hospitals, leaving nurses and other healthcare workers either unprepared or scared away by the bosses’ media hysteria. Even so, some workers are fighting back. A protest in Dallas, in front of the hospital where a worker from Liberia died, called for justice for this victim of capitalist neglect.
Politicians from both parties have proposed a travel ban from West Africa, a move that would only discourage healthcare workers from going to treat patients there. The rulers are also stoking racist fear of African immigrant workers, who live in fear of being quarantined or deported (see page 4). Their children are bullied in school; their neighborhoods are terrorized. U.S. imperialists know Ebola is not the apocalypse. They are using the disease to gauge the limits of their ability to extend fascism.
U.S. rulers would love nothing more than a true pandemic to blame on a foreign enemy and galvanize U.S. workers toward war. The bosses had hoped to use 9/11 to that end but fell short, in part because a one-time attack failed to force workers to fall back on the state for their protection. An acute, long-term health threat could be more effective in this respect. It’s worth noting that before 9/11, U.S. ruling-class planners were preparing mainly for bioterrorism and their own fascist counter-moves (see box).
Communism: The Best Medicine
Under capitalism, the working class cannot escape the lethal deficiencies of a profit-driven health system. Communism — a system run by and for workers, without profits or bosses — would prevent many diseases by eradicating their underlying causes. It would cope with unforeseen outbreaks by using science in the service of the masses. The Chinese Revolution eliminated parasitic afflictions like schistosomiasis. It organized masses of “barefoot doctors” who, with proper training, were sent to the countryside to treat and contain curable illnesses. By organizing the masses, China ended the destructive flooding of rivers. Famine and malnutrition, facts of life for workers and peasants for centuries, became things of the past. Unfortunately, the abandonment of communist goals and the pursuit of capitalist profit in China have eroded those landmark advances.
Stamp Out the Disease of Capitalism!
Progressive Labor Party is fighting for a society run by the working class, one that will eliminate profit for all time. The reversals of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions have taught us the dangers of vestiges of capitalism, like the wage system and privileged elites. Freed from profits or bosses, a communist society will put the working class first. Food and water will be shared. And racism—a source of most of today’s threats to workers’ health—will be outlawed.
In short, communism will eliminate the most dangerous disease of all — capitalism. So join the fight to destroy the profit system and build the Progressive Labor Party!
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Apartheid Grows in Brooklyn — Students, Parents & Teachers Fight Back
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- 30 October 2014 181 hits
Brooklyn, NY, October 10 — Over 200 high school students, parents, teachers and community members filled the cafeteria at John Jay Campus in Park Slope tonight for a town hall against racism. Student after student spoke of the daily attacks they faced, mainly from the New York Police Department and school safety officers. The event was sparked by the latest “crime” of Hanging-Out-While-Black-or-Latin on a street corner in this gentrified, mostly white neighborhood.
Several weeks ago, a neighborhood resident witnessed the kkkops following and eventually driving out a group of black and Latin students who were socializing on a public sidewalk. She went to a community board meeting and blasted the cops’ commander. The officer responded that the teenagers shouldn’t be there if they weren’t playing basketball or soccer or “doing something productive in the neighborhood.”
Apartheid in Brooklyn
This blatant support of apartheid policies angered John Jay students, parents and teachers, who had recently rallied against the racist murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. They are building a movement against racism in Park Slope and in and around John Jay, and were ready to respond to this latest attack. The student government and PTA at one of the four schools on the campus immediately took action by organizing the town hall.
Students spoke of their daily run-ins with cops and local businesspeople, who make it clear that the teenagers aren’t wanted in the neighborhood. When John Jay students go to neighborhood parks, cops park nearby to watch their every move. Under orders from the NYPD, school safety agents follow suit, yelling and shoving the kids to leave the neighborhood and go home immediately after school.
At the town hall meeting, as a man in charge of John Jay’s school safety agents approached the mic, the kids started to jeer and boo. He tried to get support by saying that his staff of safety agents was mainly black and Latin, but this appeal to nationalism didn’t work. The students shouted, “So what? They still harass us!”
This bosses’ lackey claimed he had no idea what was happening at John Jay and that our campus might need new agents. He was booed again, because
several students from other New York public schools came with the same complaints about the NYPD and school safety. The town hall made one thing clear: While black and Latin students in New York face the brunt of attacks by the NYPD, school safety agents and the city’s Department of Education, all youth are being attacked across the city. We are all hurt by racism.
How to Smash Racism
The town hall raised big questions. Why are black and Latin youth targeted for this abuse? What can we do to end racism for good? Members of Progressive Labor Party struggled for those involved to understand that racism is inherent to capitalism, and therefore can only be destroyed through communist revolution. We have a long way to go in winning that big struggle. But the small class struggle we are waging brings us one step closer each day.
Several family members of people murdered by the NYPD attended the town hall, and one of them spoke about the oppressive role of police in this society, and how students’ and workers’ rights are non-existent in the current period of war and fascism. A call was made to follow up the meeting with a march to the local police precinct. Most who attended left with a copy of CHALLENGE.
The ruling-class need for racism will continue to provide opportunities to unite workers in sharp struggles around these issues. The growing network of families and friends of victims of police murders, combined with the leadership shown by young black and Latin students at this event, is a force to be reckoned with. The fight for a world without racism will advance by building PLP and the fight for a communist world.
NEW YORK CITY, October 16 — Fighting back against the fascist jailing of 39 young people arrested in a violent police raid on the Grant and Manhattanville public housing projects last June, over a 100 protesters, including 60 Columbia students and about 40 others, showed up at the court hearing today. There were so many, the hearing was shifted to a smaller courtroom at the last minute, just to keep them out!
The arrested youths haven’t been charged with actual crimes, only with conspiracy. Their arrests were a full-scale racist assault, as the cops swarmed the projects on 125th St, complete with helicopters, bashing down doors, trashing apartments, intimidating grandmothers and toddlers, seeking to arrest 103 indicted young people. Bail was set so high that no one was able to post it, which has meant four months in jail with no trial.
These projects house poor, black residents and provide shoddy services and almost no recreational facilities. Young people go to failing schools without after-school programs and have few job opportunities or organized activities.
Rather than providing any kind of services, or even repairing and maintaining apartments, the rulers and their NYPD spent three years planning this raid, searching cell phone data and social media to find connections between kids to present as evidence of conspiracies! At the hearing for the first 37, all were sent back to jail for another two months—and the prosecution is offering them “deals” involving twelve to fourteen year prison sentences.
A positive development is the growing unity among parents in the projects, a local church and students at nearby Columbia University. The students joined community and church members in a demonstration and press conference outside the courthouse and and inside as well. With not even enough room for all the families to sit, the students took up a vigil in the hall outside the courtroom for three hours. Both lawyers and parents came out to say thanks — the support is very important. Hearings for another group of arrestees is next week, and we will return to support them too.
Parents and some students will also continue to gather in the local church in which we have been active for many years to build this struggle and to demand that Columbia University live up to its promise to donate $17 million for projects the community wants, in compensation for Columbia’s massive expansion into Harlem.
As we have seen in Ferguson and on Staten Island, the ruling class and their police servants are out for blood, and the degree of force and intimidation is escalating rapidly. As conditions for workers worsen and wars increase, rebellion that unifies workers, the unemployed and students is needed — and it’s beginning to grow. With communist leadership, that rebellion will lead to revolution, and to a future where the working class rules on its own behalf.
