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John Brown, Harriet Tubman: models for multiracial fightback
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- 09 October 2021 109 hits
This coming October 17 marks the 162nd anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. It was a revolutionary revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle!
1850s: U.S. capitalist class splits violently
The setting of John Brown’s Raid is the U.S. of the 1850s, with dueling factions of the U.S. capitalist class fighting each other. To the Southern slave-owning planters, harvesting cotton depended on enslaving Black workers indefinitely, even if it meant seceding and forming their own country. The Southern capitalists had a stranglehold on U.S. state power, controlling the Supreme Court and the presidency for decades. The logic of the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court case of 1857 gave a green light to expand slavery, and in 1859, John Brown led his multiracial raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
The Southern plantation-owning U.S. capitalists were terrified by John Brown’s Raid’s militant, multiracial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five Black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:
"I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter."
From childhood, Brown vowed to fight slavery
This trust among white and Black workers did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive enslaved boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed Black and white people were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, NY near a Black community of former enslaved workers. Black sisters and brothers were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as "Mr." or "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).
Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both Black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the Black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, Black abolitionist and former enslaved worker.
Tubman: Liberator of 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown close. Born around 1820 of enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her owner tried selling her as "damaged goods." Instead, she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.
Over 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.
Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harper’s Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other Black raiders, discredited the image of Black people as passive victims, terrifying the Southern enslavers and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.
Black rebellions petrified slave owners
Like all forms of class society, slavery relied on ruling class violence. But to those who say workers won’t fight back against oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal.
Nat Turner’s 1831 armed rebellion catapulted abolition as an immediate demand.
Abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison and many others, joined this fight. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act extended the reach of the enslavers into the North to capture accused runaways, but abolitionists often attacked these kidnappers, sometimes freeing the runaways. Frederick Douglass said, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”The enslavers, although talking of "docile" Black workers, knew this well. They were petrified of potential Black rebels and of "outside agitators."
They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep abolitionist literature away from them. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas
cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the Black and militant white abolitionists, multiracial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.
Revolutionary mass violence
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in antiracist struggle to join Progressive Labor Party (PLP). PLP stands on the shoulders of Brown, Tubman, Douglass and the masses of workers who supported John Brown’s Raid and the Underground Railroad. These antiracists and their politics, however, were not without limitations.
John Brown correctly analyzed that only direct action and violence could end slavery — and on the eve of his execution, even admitted he underestimated how much violence it would take. PLP applauds the merciless violence shown by Brown to racists like plantation owners and kidnappers but rejects small-scale guerilla warfare. We fight for a mass militant communist movement whose soldiers will come from workers in the factories and fields. Communist revolution means millions of us —eventually all of us — must become communist organizers at our jobs, campuses, barracks, and mass organizations.
Mass violence is the opposite of John Brown’s religious-based outlook of individual martyrdom. History has shown that wherever the working masses have stood and fought, they are invincible. Mass violence means millions of workers are organized and armed, first, with communist ideas. It means fighting to win workers to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and analyzing the world from the perspective of class struggle and smashing racism with communist revolution for workers’ dictatorship.
The working class’ historic task is to overthrow capitalism. Violence cannot be avoided. However, this means neither dwelling on death nor on individualistic “revolutionary suicide,” but on organizing and preserving our forces to continue the struggle.
Join PLP!
Today there is again a split within the U.S. ruling class, but the world situation is much different. U.S. imperialism is declining while Chinese and Russian imperialism grow more assertive. The Big Fascist (see glossary box), imperialist section of the U.S. ruling class has no Lincoln to unite their faction of capitalists, just the feeble Joe Biden. The Big Fascists want to build liberal fascism under the guise of saving a democracy that never existed while building for war with China and or Russia. Meanwhile the domestically oriented, Small Fascist capitalists have unhinged egomaniacs like Donald Trump who want an isolationist “Fortress America.”
Both capitalist factions mean sharper racist, sexist, and open fascist attacks on the international working class. PLP fights to follow John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s example and lead the working class to revolution where workers run the world, without racist bosses and their profit system. JOIN US!
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St Vincent Hospital: Historic strike stands in solidarity vs sicko bosses
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- 09 October 2021 90 hits
Worcester, MA—Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continue to stand by the 700 nurses and other members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), who have proudly been on strike since March 8. Recently this collective passed the 200-day mark, making this the longest strike in Massachusetts history! Party members championed these workers with a bull horn rally at the picket line in front of St. Vincent Hospital and distributed copies of CHALLENGE newspaper. We also created and distributed revolutionary flyers, calling out the hospital bosses for their racist attack on healthcare standards and putting forth that while this historic moment is one to be celebrated, a healthcare system under profit driven capitalism will never serve the working class. We proudly chanted FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM, POWER TO THE WORKERS!
Improper working conditions, Improper patient care
The strike demands are primarily centered around safe staffing ratios (no more than 4 patients per nurse on medical floors) and better patient care. Nurses on the picket line have been drawing attention to the deteriorating quality of healthcare for workers in Worcester and around the country. PLP also made the connection to the deterioration of healthcare for the international working-class.
Like so many capitalist institutions, St. Vincent Hospital is owned by Tenet Healthcare Corporation, a for-profit outfit headquartered in Dallas, TX, which owns 60 community hospitals and 460 other healthcare facilities, including surgical hospitals and imaging centers. They make billions providing substandard healthcare.
Now, in an effort to improve their profit margins, they’ve minimized hospital staff, pay the lowest wages, and bust unions. In fact, Tenet is so determined to break the strike that they have spent over $65 million, including $100 an hour to pay “replacement” nurses (eg. scab nurses hired specifically to break the strike).
Capitalism in crisis robs the working class
The greed of the Tenet bosses is deep and vicious. During the pandemic, Tenet took $2.8 billion of taxpayers money from the CARES ACT in 2020, and then proceeded to lay off and furlough thousands of desperately needed hospital staff as hundreds of thousands of workers were losing their lives to a deadly disease.
As a result of this opportunistic corruption, Tenet has made $500 million in profits since the beginning of the pandemic, while reports from hospital staff revealed that “patients suffered preventable falls and bedsores, dangerous delays in receiving medications and other treatments,” all due to staff shortages (telegram.com).
The money, which now lines Tenet’s pockets was designated to fund the extra expenditures needed during the pandemic. Instead it is being used to pay for scab nurses and police protection, and to assault the working class, both as patients and healthcare workers. Now Tenet, blaming the nurses, has cut back services and 80 inpatient beds, intensifying the Covid-19 surge in Massachusetts.
This is why a capitalist healthcare system that is motivated by profits will never be designed to serve the sick and in-need. The working class must design and call for a healthcare system that puts the health of their fellow class brothers and sisters first. A communist healthcare system in which all workers are encouraged to champion each other and the only compensation is a healthy working class.
The medical monster machine
Tenet, the “Amazon of healthcare,” represents everything that is wrong with profit driven healthcare in the U.S. It treats patients and healthcare workers' lives as expendable, as it boasts to its shareholders about holding three billion in cash - 10 times what it had in 2019, while patients and staff members suffer.
If Tenet is able to crush this strike, it will set a dangerous precedent for reducing staffing ratios across the state and the country.
Over the course of the strike, PLP members and friends have walked the picket line consistently, have called for increased militancy, and exposed the racism and sexism endemic in our healthcare system. The drive to improve profit margins under this racist system has led to far worse outcomes and inhumane treatment for Black and Latin workers.
Community hospitals like St. Vincent, which disproportionately serves Black and Latin workers, has become the testing ground for ever more dangerous cost-saving measures that drag down the quality of healthcare overall, while insurance premiums skyrocket.
The only way to end this attack for good is for the working class to revolt against for-profit healthcare and fight for communism. Under communism, we can prioritize the lives of hospital workers and patients and not the petty greed of a handful of wealthy capitalists.
PLP is calling on other hospital workers, other unions, and particularly MNA unions in other hospitals: to strike in solidarity. Our strikes become schools for communism, teaching the working-class how to fight arm in arm for one another! The fight for safe staffing and conditions in healthcare institutions is all our struggle and our responsibility. We must rally to ensure these brave working class fighters emerge victorious from this struggle until a communist revolution is on the horizon.
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Southern Mexican Border: Liberal fascists use borders for imperialist needs
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- 09 October 2021 96 hits
The city of Tapachula in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala has become the largest refugee camp in the Americas with 35,000 people trapped in a makeshift city of barbed-wired streets (El Pais, 9/12). This is a direct consequence of joint policies between the governments of U.S. President Joe Biden and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO).
This mass incarceration of workers, primarily from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti is cruel evidence of liberals’ willingness and ability to exploit the power of the state in naked attempts to control and divide the working class to drive down wages and build nationalism.
Both AMLO and Biden campaigned as alternatives to unrestrained fascism and unregulated capitalism. But despite the liberals feigning horror at Donald Trump’s immigration politics, under Biden the hunt for workers at the border between the U.S. and Mexico has not only continued, it has become more brutal (see Editorial). In Mexico, AMLO is willing to do the dirty work of corralling workers at its borders in exchange for U.S. funding for programs – cynically called “Sowing Life” and “Building the Future”–that will create temporary worker programs to supply cheap labor for AMLO’s megaprojects in southern Mexico.
The capitalists have always used borders and immigration policy to meet their imperial needs and keep the working class divided. They build maquiladoras (factories) close to the border to exploit low wages while facilitating the movement of goods.
They institute guest worker or bracero programs to move cheap labor across the border only when they need it. AMLO and Biden both make a show of welcoming workers fleeing the U.S. disaster in Afghanistan. But in Tapachula, like in northern Mexico, workers desperate for relief from the brutality of capitalism find themselves herded into overcrowded camps with inadequate food and facilities. Those who risk fleeing to the surrounding mountains or jungle are pursued by AMLO’s newly formed National Guard or by criminal gangs ignored by the police.
Under communism there will be no nations or borders. All workers will work to meet the needs of workers all over the world. Capitalism is brutal for the working class. And the biggest capitalists in both the U.S. and Mexico are the liberals who are inflicting tremendous attacks on our class. Elections offer no hope of changing this as the choice between the Small Fascists like Donald Trump or the Big Fascists like Biden is a lose-lose for the working class (See glossary, page 6). Liberation for our class across the globe will only come through communist revolution and a society based on workers’ power.
HAITI, October 3–The caravans of immigrants heading to the United States making news are the result of the failure of capitalism and imperialism. This is not only true of migration to the U.S.; workers the world over leave their homes in search of safety from war, famine, climate disasters and violence, and for a decent life for themselves and their families. The Haiti refugee crisis yet again exposes capitalism’s inability to meet workers’ needs.
Racist rhetoric
For many decades now, migrants from the Caribbean and Central America have moved towards the U.S. and other countries in the western hemisphere. As soon as migrant workers are on the move, the bosses and their media begin demonizing them. Migrants are labeled “parasites, lazy, job stealers and disease carriers” as if they wouldn’t rather stay in their homes to build their lives.
Today, most migrants arriving on the U.S. southern border are from Central and Latin America, but many are also from Haiti. Tens of thousands are making the trek across Latin America seeking safety.
The pictures coming from the U.S. border (See editorial on page 2). are a warning to migrants of the fascist terror that awaits them: border agents on horseback riding down and whipping migrants from Haiti like the old slave catchers in Saint Domingue (what the French slavers called Haiti). More warnings to worker migrating from Central America come from photos of refugee workers and their families being kept in concentration camps
How it started
Historically, the European ruling classes sent their representatives around the world freely—to invade and set up colonies and slavery as economic models. In the so-called New World, the colonizers attacked the indigenous population with murder, rape, and disease. They stole land and wealth and forced some into slavery.
Later, the colonialists brought Black workers from Africa to be enslaved. Each group of oppressed workers in turn resisted. As time passed and the economy matured, the bosses needed to come up with a new form of slavery to take advantage of industrialization. Wage slavery was born. Today all countries are capitalist.
How it’s continuing
The impact of imperialism has been intense: racism and sexism, devastating effects of “natural” disasters, joblessness, political instability, and failing infrastructure. For almost two centuries, the countries of Latin America have been under U.S. imperialist domination. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine forbade any other power from intervening in this hemisphere.
In Haiti, this has meant the U.S. has been free to invade in 1915, 1994 and 2004 putting puppets in office and fomenting coups when their interests were in danger. This policy has been applied throughout Latin America.
Migrant workers did not create the conditions that forced them to move—capitalism did. However, nothing stays the same, change is inevitable, but how things change depends on us. What we do counts: fighting anti-immigrant racism with expressions of solidarity at any border, organizing on the job, in the military, and in our neighborhoods. But we must use these fights to build and recruit to the international communist Progressive Labor Party.
We will abolish wage slavery
There will come a time when slavery—chattel or wage—will no longer be tolerated; and like the masses in Haiti (the first enslaved people to successfully overthrow slavery), revolutionaries will lead the way for all humanity for an egalitarian society called communism.
Then workers across the world will be armed to fight the capitalist system and its lackeys— politicians, media, gangs, and bosses. We stand shoulder to shoulder with migrants around the world—workers of the world, unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains!
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Actions speak louder than words at education caucus
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- 09 October 2021 96 hits
SEPTEMBER 11— On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, more than 65 faculty, academic workers, and graduate students gathered in a virtual forum sponsored by the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to analyze “New Keywords of Our Struggle.” Setting a key theme of the conference—“capitalism continues to kill us, as it is intended to do”—the keynote speaker, an adjunct, quoted Karl Marx’s statement that the original accumulation of capital in Europe was a story written “in letters of blood and fire.” He urged “communism” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the keywords needed to end climate catastrophe, pandemic mass death, and racist killer cops.
He said that he looked forward to the day when words like “race”, “exploitation”, “property”, and “wages” joined “the lexicon of archaic terms.” Six speakers and a vigorous open discussion followed, demonstrating the sharpening of Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) work among academics and emphasizing the need for current organizing to be guided by a revolutionary outlook and party.
The politics of words
Speakers highlighted how certain “keywords” either open doors for more radical organizing or obscure or discourage such organizing. A Black professor criticized the new keyword “intersectionality”, arguing how it can also cover up campus policies better described by an old keyword, “exploitation.”A university union leader analyzed the term “union” as itself a contradiction: workers are weaker facing the boss without a union, which makes more unified struggle against capitalist exploitation possible; however, the union itself, narrowly focused only on its own members, becomes a barrier to wider working-class consciousness.
A recent Black college grad, now an elementary school teacher, described how she is pushed by her bosses to use the keyword “professionalism,” even with her very young students, which she criticized as a way to obscure the exploitation of teachers and fill young students with self-blame.
Other speakers, like one organizer from Colombia, highlighted the need to bring words in other languages and struggles in other countries into the political awareness of people in the Global North. She explained the power of terms like “la primera línea”(the frontline, youth brigades who protect marchers) and “la minga” (collective decisions in popular assemblies) to building anti-capitalist and revolutionary consciousness. A speaker from Afghanistan, now teaching in CUNY, interrogated the keyword of “the state,” noting how imperialists have used the capitalist concepts of modernization, human rights, and women’s rights to obscure the aims of the U.S. invasions and occupations.
The final speaker sharpened the discussion of keywords by introducing the concept of joining a communist party, specifically PLP. Only by building a mass communist party can we actually abolish the death trap of capitalism. He contrasted communism with socialism, which at best only moderates capitalist exploitation. Social Democrats (liberal fascists) like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders want to give workers a few crumbs while they lead us into dead end electoral politics. Communists know we have to destroy the bosses’ state and smash their ability to exploit our labor.
PLP’s line made clear
Vigorous debates followed, including sharp questions about the contradiction between communist revolution and national liberation. PLP’s line against nationalism was made clear. Participants concluded the conference urging the Radical Caucus to hold future keywords discussions focusing on individual or juxtaposed words: “communism” or even “communism vs. socialism” or “communism vs. climate collapse. “Having a member of PLP speak openly about the need to build not only a communist movement but also a communist party like PLP reflected the growing awareness of the inability of capitalism to meet the needs of the world’s workers. It also reflected the crucial role of PLP’s long-term organizing and relationships established in the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (union), the Marxist Literary Group, and the Radical Caucus.
Since the January 2021 MLA Convention, we have worked closely in the Radical Caucus to build friendships and political ties with faculty and students, organizing an April 30 Conference on “Class Struggles in Higher Education,” three “Keywords” Reading Groups leading up to the Sept. 11 Forum, and panels for the upcoming MLA Convention in January 2022. Given the anti-communism in fake-left circles, having a long term approach to base building, communist organizing and Party building is crucial to making the discussion of communism and the need for a communist party front and center.
