Recently, a Kurdish comrade from Turkey came to our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) club meeting to report on the devastating earthquake that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions of Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian workers, youth and children. He is a member of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress, the National Writers Union, and the Labor Party of Turkey (EMEP).

On February 6th, back-to-back 7.7 and 7.6 earthquakes hit eleven provinces, home to 13.5 million people. Thousands of buildings collapsed. As of February 24, the official death toll is more than 44,000, and this only reflects reports from hospital morgues. Thousands of people are still missing, and authorities say that more than two million people have been displaced.

The bosses fear the masses and don’t want to mobilize workers and youth into a mass rescue and rebuilding effort. Communism would do exactly the opposite, we mobilize our class to provide aid and help to rebuild areas affected by natural disasters.  

While earthquakes may be a natural event, death, and destruction are not! They are a result of the greed of the profit system. All the ruined buildings were built by construction companies and monopolies using cheap and low-quality construction material. Safety was never a concern for them, even as Turkey sits on fault lines that cause earthquakes. In 1999, there was another big earthquake. Like now, the government did not send proper aid to the disaster zone. Instead, workers, socialists, trade unions, and mass organizations brought aid to Düzce and set up camps. The government sent riot police to attack the aid tents and then sent “aid.” Since then, communists and organizers have continued to fight back.

After 1999, the state passed an “earthquake” tax to prepare for future disasters. The amount of money collected in the last 24 years would save thousands of lives today. But the bosses used it for their ends.

Turkish President Erdogan’s first response was not to rush aid to the victims but to declare a state of emergency. There was no government relief effort for days, especially in the provinces of Hatay and Antakya.While people under the rubble were still tweeting their addresses, the government blocked Twitter to suppress live feeds of the devastation and opposition voices. After a public outburst, Twitter was unblocked, and almost 20,000 troops were deployed, but even then, soldiers were not directly involved in clearing the rubble and rescuing victims. Due to this capitalist incompetence, many victims died from hypothermia since the region experienced a harsh winter. Many people could not even find shroud cloths to cover their dead.

The state of emergency is aimed at attacking left-wing and progressive, mass organizations who rushed to set up relief efforts and camps for the victims. The government wants to counter class rage and solidarity. When working people act in solidarity, it boosts class confidence .”

We say NO to fascist provocations, and YES to the unity of Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian workers! We stand with workers and youth in Syria, fighting against racism and lynching that have been organized by fascist and counter-insurgency organizations. Racism is poisonous to our class. The working class has one option in confronting capitalist barbarism: our unity!

We will win. We will win with the understanding that working people do  not deserve this. We will clean this blood and dust together. And we will hold the bosses accountable for this destructive capitalist massacre. We know who the murderers are. The day is coming when the racist rulers will be buried under the rubble of their system as the workers come to power.

In Istanbul, Turkey, the riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters celebrating International Working Women’s Day. Even in the face of mass destruction from recent earthquakes, these women in Turkey remind us as antisexist, antiracist fighters worldwide, that working women are essential for a better world.

The Turkish government took a drastic turn to use religious fundamentalism to justify sexism and squelch the potential for women to live beyond the constraints of a society that supports harmful marriages and patronizing relationships between men and women. Turkish women are refusing to be silenced and are demanding an end to President Erdogon’s regime amidst complete negligence after the catastrophic earthquakes.

However, this reform obscures the Turkish bosses’ role in a rapidly declining liberal world order. Once a U.S. junior partner Turkey, desperate to compete and enjoy the imperialist spoils Russia,  is now a willing pawn of the ascendant Chinese bosses.Fascist bosses use identity puppet politicians to further capitalist terror as feminist misleaders. The Turkish opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu is spreading false promises that under his misleadership, a strong democracy will follow. He is riding on the mishandling of the recent earthquakes under the current regime, the dwindling democracy, and overall mistrust from the workers.

However, we know that no capitalist boss will end sexism and that no elected president can ever grant workers freedom. The women-led protests in Istanbul show workers we need fierce fighters to end this sexist system.

At the same time, we must confront the dangers of feminism. The capitalist women’s movement both divides the working class by gender and promotes a false unity with the liberal wing of the U.S. ruling class, basically the Democratic Party.

Like all identity politics, the women’s movement is a dead—and deadly—end for workers. It obscures the fact that capitalist society is driven by a fundamental conflict between the class that owns the means of production and the class that creates everything of value—between bosses and workers.

Feminism misleads women workers, in particular, by recruiting sell-out stooges like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and the late (and unlamented!) Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Women's liberation doesn’t come from voting, or electing women politicians to oppress us, or expanding the ranks of women CEOs to exploit us.

Bourgeois feminism and the movement of proletarian women are two fundamentally different social movements.”— Clara Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (Equality)

March 8 marks the 114th International Working Women’s Day since its initial celebration by NYC garments workers in 1909.

The struggle for working-class women was inextricably linked to the open call for overthrowing the czarist government. Today, working-class women’s demands are filtered into reforms that benefit bosses and their ruling-class servants. Still working women around the world are at the helm of class struggle, defying the bosses sexist and racist divisions.

From Baltimore to Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Haiti, women are leading the fightback against racist police terror and attacks on healthcare.

From Afghanistan to Russia, working women militantly defied the sexist national bosses and marched against imperialist violence.

The Progressive Labor Party fights to smash capitalism along with its special oppression against women that hurts all workers. Sexism relegates women to reproductive labor, such as cooking, cleaning, and care work, promotes sexist culture that cheapens, degrades, enables the exploitation and abuse of women as sexual objects, and ultimately pits men and women against each other, driving the global epidemic of femicide.

Across the capitalist imperialist world, the leadership and militancy of women, particularly Black women, is essential if we want to break free from the chains of capitalist oppression. Women workers—not “girl bosses”—should run the world alongside the multiracial, multi-gendered international working class.

How it began
International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) began in New York as “Women’s Day,” organized by the Socialist Party of America. After the strike of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union in 1909, women met at the international meeting of communist and socialist leaders, the Second International of 1910. They proposed establishing an International Women’s Day to commemorate their comrades in the U.S. By 1911, more than a million workers were celebrating IWWD.

We can also look to find lessons from the two great communist revolutions. The Soviet revolution was rooted in a firm rejection of sexism, from an early pamphlet by Lenin to struggles for more collective living experiments and job opportunities for women workers. Thirty years later, the Chinese revolution also began with an aggressive struggle to free women workers, most of them in agriculture, from the feudal oppression that had enslaved them. After both of these revolutions, important social and economic roles—including positions as doctors, teachers, and engineers--were opened to women workers as sexist notions of their “natural inferiority” were attacked. Divorce and abortion were made freely available. Relics of feudalism, such as the cruel binding of young women’s feet in China, were enthusiastically abolished.

Although sexism predates capitalism, all social relations under class societies like capitalism were always predicated on the idea of preserving private property and maximizing exploitation. Sexism, the special oppression of women, justifies dividing men and women into specific gender roles. Sexist divisions generate superprofits for the capitalists, oppress and objectify half the working-class population, in an attempt to paralyze any working-class unity.

International Working Women's Day belongs to the working class. Help build one world, one party for all workers by taking the lead in fights against police terror, exploitative landlords, and bosses. Painting banks pink and electing women politicians to a government that maintains the super-exploitation of women workers is far from the answer. Reformist solutions—such as  more "democracy"—will not end sexism. Under capitalism, they will only incentivize individuals to strive for their self-interest, the selfish, me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

Only by destroying the wage system can we bring an end to sexism. Only then will the profit system’s dogma--“Every man or woman for themselves”—be replaced by the communist principle, “To each according to need.” Only then will collective behavior overcome the selfish me-first thinking enshrined by capitalism.

A world led by PLP
Progressive Labor Party's deep commitment to seeing a world beyond the shallow gaze of identity politics is one of the tenets of our Party's line. Working class women are leading fights against the bosses’ racist and sexist attacks worldwide, including the recent nurse strike in New York City, protests against sexist political violence in Haiti, and battling sexist attacks in Iran against women who refuse to wear hijabs. Working women's power will be self-evident in a communist world, as they will be giving leadership in the fight against sexism. In a world led by millions of communists in the PLP, we have the basis for living an egalitarian life free from capitalist chains.

It is PLP’s obligation to expose and explain that women's liberation doesn’t come from voting, or electing women politicians to oppress us, or expanding the ranks of women CEOs to exploit us. J
For a deeper look at sexism, see PL magazine article “ONLY COMMUNIST REVOLUTION CAN END SEXISM” at www.plp.org/plmagazine

Song of Spain By Langston Hughes

A bombing plane’s
The song of Spain.
Bullets like rain’s
The song of Spain.
Poison gas is Spain.
A knife in the back
And its terror and pain is Spain.
…
The people are Spain
The people beneath that bombing plane….
Workers, make no bombs again!
Workers, mine no gold again!
Workers, lift no hand again
To build up profits for the rape of Spain!
Workers, see yourselves as Spain!
…
I must drive the bombers out of Spain!
I must drive the bombers out of the world!
I must take the world for my own again—
    A workers’ world
    Is the song of Spain.

The last issue of CHALLENGE (3/15/23) revisited  Langston Hughes work in the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Hughes became inspired by the growing multiracial, anti-capitalist fightback, gravitating to communist politics. In this piece we dive into Hughes political and literary contributions to the anti-fascist movement during the Spanish Civil War.

Langston Hughes, a major 20th-century literary figure, moved significantly to the left in the mid-1930s—as a poet, playwright, and journalist. At a time when imperialist fascism in Italy and Germany brought on the invasion of Ethiopia (1935-37) the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and eventually World War II (1939-1945), Hughes became one of the world’s leading communist and antiracist voices.

Poems and plays: fighting racism with multiracial unity
In 1933, after more than a year in the Soviet Union, Hughes returned to California and probably his favorite subject: the working class of the U.S. He joined a group of writers and artists active in the local Communist Party (CP)-affiliated John Reed Club, named after the communist journalist and activist who covered the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution in 1917.  Still involved in protests to free the Scottsboro Eight, he composed “One More ‘S’ in the USA,” a song for a CP fundraiser for the Scottsboro victims of the capitalists’ criminal injustice system. He also co-wrote a play, never produced, called “Blood on the Fields,” about a strike by agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Beyond his local activities, Hughes joined national organizations to foster multiracial unity by bringing leading Black writers and intellectuals into dialogue and actions with communists.  He became president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, which evolved into the National Negro Congress and involved such famous cultural figures as Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Catlett. Though Hughes always worked collectively, he was singled out for racist criticism and red-baiting, not to mention surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Fighting fascism with communist internationalism
In the mid-1930s, Hughes wrote and produced plays about Black working-class life and the importance of multiracial unity, such as When the Jack Hollers. But the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935—a pure act of racist aggression—turned the attention of Black workers to worldwide racism and fascism, the phase of capitalism when the bosses discard their charade of liberal democracy (see Glossary, p. 6).  Black newspapers like the Amsterdam News reported weekly on Ethiopia.  

Then, in 1936, came the Spanish Civil War, when General Francisco Franco and his armies rebelled against the leftist Popular Front government, supported by communists, socialists, and anarchists.  Nazi Germany and fascist Italy sent arms and planes to Franco.   The Spanish “Republican” government appealed to the U.S., France, and Great Britain for aid.  But not surprisingly, the capitalist bosses wanted nothing to do with it.  By contrast, the Soviet Union sent aid and established International Brigades for workers of all nations to join.  Thousands of workers from the U.S., Black and white, many of them communists, enlisted in the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  Within the U.S., communists raised funds for the war effort against the fascists. Hughes helped organize the American Writers and Artists Ambulance Corps, which bought an ambulance for the bloody campaign.  

The International Workers Order, another communist-organized organization, sent Hughes on a 12-city tour to raise more aid for the anti-fascists in Spain.  The IWO published a A New Song, a booklet of 17 political poems by Hughes, including “Let America Be America Again,” “Justice,” “Chant for Tom Mooney,” “Chant for May Day,” “Ballads of Lenin,” and “Open Letter to the South.” In “Song of Spain,” Hughes moves from images of bullfights and flamenco guitarists to the grim realities of wary.

Hughes subsequently went to Spain himself to send back wartime dispatches to the Baltimore Afro-American and other Black news agencies. En route he stopped in Paris to deliver a rousing speech, “Too Much of Race,” to the International Writers Congress.  It included these communist ideas: “We represent the end of race.  And the Fascists know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war, and no more money for the munition makers, because the workers of the world will have triumphed” (Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, p. 90).  Hughes understood that capitalism absolutely requires racism to exploit and divide the working class.

In July 1937, Hughes crossed over the French Pryenees into northern Spain and then to Barcelona and Valencia.  By August he was in Madrid, where he joined Communist Party USA members in the Lincoln Brigade and interviewed Black volunteers for his dispatches.  When he traveled outside the city, communists helped arrange his tours.  During his four months in Madrid, Hughes circulated among other writers hunkered down in the besieged city, including Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and Lillian Hellman.  The great singer Paul Robeson also came to give concerts for the anti-fascist cause.  

Hughes red lit torch: fight for communism –workers’ power
As historian Brian Dolinar has observed, “Hughes explained to Black readers how the fight against fascism was connected to the fight against racism at home” (Dolinar, p. 87).  His essays “Laughter in Madrid,” (published in The Nation, January 29, 1938), voiced admiration for workers’ courage and their resistance to fascist rule:  “Yes, people still laugh in Madrid.  In this astonishing city of bravery and death, where the houses run right up to the trenches and some of the street-car lines stop only at the barricades, people still laugh, children play in the streets...Madrid, dressed in bravery and laughter; knowing death and the sound of guns day and night, but resolved to live, not die!”  Back in the U.S., Hughes advocated for the Double V campaign,  the connected struggles against racism in the U.S. and fascism in Europe.  

In his journalism, poetry, plays, and essays, Hughes brilliantly conveyed the experiences of ordinary workers who strived to unite as a force for history.  Progressive Labor Party can carry on Hughes’ legacy when we lead the way toward multiracial unity and revolution.

[Biographical information is drawn from Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols. 2nd edition, New York: Oxford, 2002; and Brian Dolinar, The Black Cultural Front:  Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation, Jackson, MS:  University Press of Mississippi, 2012.]