San Francisco, May 6—Fighting back against a series of racist killings and Mayor Ed Lee’s callous indifference to a 17-day hunger strike, a member of Progressive Labor Party helped to lead 200 workers and students in a seven-hour takeover of San Francisco’s City Hall. Banging on the mayor’s door, protesters chanted, “Mayor Lee, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
During the occupation, the protesters—women and men, Asian, Latin, Black and white—took over the area outside the mayor’s door, as well as the main rotunda and eventually the entire first floor of City Hall. We chanted, “If we don’t get it, SHUT IT DOWN!” One young female fighter sang songs of liberation that echoed through the building and inspired us all to keep fighting.
It was on the 12th day of the hunger strike that the PLP member and two students decided to up the ante in pushing Lee to fire racist police chief Greg Suhr. The chief’s termination was the sole demand of the hunger strikers; Suhr’s kkkcops have murdered eight Black and Latin workers since 2014 (http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/murdermap.html). We began organizing other students and workers to stop playing by the rules, which meant being willing to get arrested. Our collective understanding of the importance of militant action was deepened by our week together on the strike line, reading CHALLENGE and having long debates about reform versus revolution.
All agreed that firing Suhr was a reform struggle, but that he had to go—and that this struggle could be used to move people to the left. Revolutionary politics can enter the mass reform movement only if members of PLP are involved in day-to-day struggles and bring the Party’s ideas with them. One difficulty for communists is that reform groups generally place individual identity politics—namely nationalism and feminism—over collective revolutionary politics and working-class unity. In San Francisco, two of these groups proposed shutting down the bridges and BART (public transportation) while individuals locked themselves to various things. The Party member and his base fought against passive, isolated actions and for more collective action, and to organize to bring more people into the movement. Our line won.
Our collective leadership met many times during the occupation to strategize on maintaining the action’s militancy and sharp political tone. We numbered about 50 people. As we occupied City Hall, the police tore down the hunger strikers’ camp in the Mission district. Hundreds of people turned out to try to salvage the camp. Our collective met again and debated whether we should abandon our action and try to help save the camp, or stick to our plan and have the Mission protestors help us. We decided that our action was more important at the time. Within 30 minutes, dozens of supporters were at the doors of City Hall, but the police wouldn’t let anyone in.
We decided to pretend to call off our occupation, to enable us to open the doors and increase our numbers. The police completely fell for it. As we marched downstairs and found no cops around, we sent folks to sprint and open the doors to our comrades. Our numbers suddenly doubled. We now occupied the entire first floor of City Hall, and the doors stayed open. Over the next hour, our numbers continued to grow until we formed a line two-deep and wall-to-wall against the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department riot squad. At the start of the day, only five people had signed up to be arrested; now we had hundreds lined up against the State. The Party member explained that no cops—Asian, Latin, Black or white—can be friends of the working class, since their job is to serve and protect the capitalist system and private property. Some occupiers, who’d previously thought we could appeal to cops’ “humanity,” came around to our position.
The takeover line was a beautiful thing. The youngest person was 15, the oldest 76. There were women and men together in a united, multiracial group. We stood without fear and with love for those next to us, ready for whatever the police would bring. We chanted, “We ready, we ready, we ready for y’all!” When the police finally charged with batons and riot gear, nobody ran or backed down. Everyone held the line—it looked like two football teams locked at the line of scrimmage.
After a two-hour stalemate, the cops arrested 33 protesters, 19 of them women. By then we claimed City Hall for seven hours, and the fear that often paralyzes our class had vanished. While in jail we sang, laughed and discussed revolutionary communist politics. My base jumped from five to 15. Comrades from around the Bay Area distributed PL literature and helped organize jail support.
Lessons from this action will continue to raise the consciousness of young people in leadership roles in these reform groups. The young people’s multiracial unity has given them new political clarity. It has empowered them to challenge anti-communist forces that seek to marginalize them.
Youth are desperately searching for a Party like ours. Many are tired of the dead-end reform movement that has them chasing from issue to issue—one step forward and two steps back, with no real analysis of the forces driving racism, inequality, and inter-imperialist war. They know capitalism is the problem, but nobody organizes against capitalism like Progressive Labor Party. It is our duty to bring the Party’s line to the masses; otherwise we allow them to be misled by the bosses’ puppets. We can’t let them fall prey to the Democratic Party and their suave preachers, liberal sellouts and revisionists. Put the line on the line! We are now organizing a fundraiser for one young fighter fighting felony charges. Please donate to our legal fund, and fight for communism!
PAKISTAN, May 1—“One world, one fight! Workers of the world unite!” Refusing to be silenced by trade union misleaders, members of Progressive Labor Party brought revolutionary communist ideas to marches and other May Day events across Pakistan.
Workers March For Demands
Various workers’ organizations held seminars, symposia and processions to celebrate International Workers’ Day throughout the country. PL’ers participating through their unions supported demands for a higher minimum wage, equal wage for women workers, and workplace safety. At the same time, they sharpened the politics at these events by chanting slogans against exploitation, privatization, inequality, injustice, poverty, terrorism and capitalism.
Another major May Day demand was to abolish the contract labor system. The reform struggle, also backed by PL comrades, is for every worker be given an official appointment letter that guarantees regular employment for a fixed period. With these letters, workers cannot be fired at the bosses’ will.
The union misleaders who oppose PLP’s organizing and calls for revolution remain silent about capitalist oppression. Unlike fake revolutionary groups, PL’ers connect the struggles for immediate reforms to the fight for the only true solution for the international working class: communism. The Party’s May Day chants, taken up by many workers, reflected our revolutionary politics: “Long live communist revolution!” “No to capitalism, yes to communism!” “Down with capitalist bosses!” “All power to the working class!”
PL’ers Fight For Internationalism
In conversations and struggles with coworkers, comrades elaborated on these chants. . They explained the history of communist struggle and attacked the revisionist (fake leftist) ideas that wrecked the old communist movement. To build a world without exploitation, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism, we must fight for an international communist revolution under the red banner of the international revolutionary communist party, PLP
As PLP organizes women workers to play active roles in the Party, on the job and in the trade unions, the Party also organizes against sexist wage inequalities. On May Day, comrades denounced the capitalist bosses who want workers to believe women workers are inferior, to justify lower wages for women and steal more profit. PLP fights to smash sexism by developing women leaders who will be at the forefront of communist revolution.
Local Struggles Build Anti-Imperialist Movement
Leading up to May Day, PLP’s work emphasized the necessity of unity within the working class and improved coordination among the trade unions. PL’ers have been organizing other trade union members to support workers of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in their struggle against layoffs and privatization—an anti-worker attack by the Pakistani bosses and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an arm of U.S. imperialism. PL’ers and friends have argued that if the bosses’ plans for PIA go through, it would pave the way for privatization of other industries like steel mills, the Sui gas field in Balochistan province in southwest Pakistan, and elsewhere.
The struggle for solidarity with the PIA workers is a powerful anti-imperialist opportunity for PLP and the international working class. The privatization of PIA reflects the sharpening imperialist rivalry between U.S. and Chinese bosses. The U.S. is eager to keep Pakistan as an ally, given its geopolitical importance in South Asia. China is even more eager to draw Pakistan into its own imperialist orbit and consolidate a vital economic corridor for One Belt, One Road, the initiative to expand China’s influence and increase exports throughout Eurasia.
The capitalist rulers of China and the U.S. (through the IMF) are both bribing Pakistan’s bosses with economic incentives to restructure PIA (Express Tribune of Pakistan, 3/13/13). China’s most recent offer was $500 million in aid to PIA, as well as new planes, technical support and construction of a new international airport at Gwadar, a strategic deep-water port developed jointly by Pakistan and China (Business Recorder, 3/30/15). Gwadar is located near the Iranian border and just outside the Strait of Hormuz, a potential chokepoint for oil shipping routes in and out of the Persian Gulf. Thirty percent of all maritime-traded petroleum—and 20 percent of the world’s oil, overall—passes through the strait (businessinsider.com, 4/1/15). In January, Pakistan’s bosses announced the privatization deals were being finalized (Business Recorder, 1/20).
What the bosses failed to factor in was workers’ resistance. Fightback against PIA’s privatization has been fierce, culminating in a strike on February 2. Workers battled riot police at the gates of Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport, leaving two workers dead and several injured. Flight disruptions and profit losses have set back plans by the Pakistani, U.S., and Chinese bosses (Nikkei Asian Review, 2/19). The struggle continues.
Our local struggles have an impact on workers all over the world. Workers in Pakistan are caught in the accelerating exploitation of inter-imperialist rivalry, an essential feature of the ruthless drive for maximum profit under capitalism. Since the surplus value that derives from workers’ labor is the lifeblood for groups of competing bosses, workers in Pakistan are well-placed to play a lead role in building an anti-imperialist movement. As PLP declared on May Day, only international communist revolution under our international communist party can free the working class from the daily miseries of capitalism. Join us!
BALTIMORE, May 4—The cops have yet again exposed themselves as the dogs of the ruling class. Today was the commemoration of four students getting shot to death by National Guard soldiers during a protest at Kent State University in 1970. Today, following in those fascist footsteps, kkkops at Morgan State University (MSU) arrested a protester for leading chants during the 145th West Wednesday rally demanding justice for Tyrone West and for all victims of police terror.
This rally on the campus and the rally on the sidewalk just outside MSU, a historically Black university, focused on the deadly role of campus cop David Lewis, who participated with City cops in the police murder of Tyrone West on July 18, 2013. The Black campus cops and an MSU boss Floyd Taliaferro, Director of University Center & Student Activities, were apathetic about MSU’s own cop’s participation in the murder of Tyrone.
Before this evening’s arrest, West Wednesday protestors marched across campus and entered the student center, by the display of former MSU students in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Trying to Intimidate Us
The order to aggressively force the protestors out of the student center came without warning. This student is now facing multiple charges. The criminal injustice system sent him to jail and held him overnight at Central Booking. Other MSU students in the group were harassed by the cops and told to report to the campus police station the next morning.
West Wednesday protestors, including PLP members, took turns waiting at Central Booking until our friend was released the next day.
The group of protestors learned yet again that cops, Black or white, carry out the bosses’ orders and do not ”serve and protect” either students or workers. This is a significant lesson, as we are in a city where the majority of cops are Black. As the chant says, “White cop, Black cop, all the same! Racist terror is the name of their game!”
Build Communism
All of this occurred less than a week after some fighters from the West Wednesday travelled to New York City to participate in the revolutionary May Day march led by Progressive Labor Party.
The most important measure of success in the fight against police terror, or in any other reform struggle, is the growth of communist understanding and the growth of Progressive Labor Party.
That’s the development that enables us to be stronger and stronger in future struggles, including the fight to entirely defeat capitalism and build, instead, the egalitarian world of sisterhood and brotherhood that we urgently need!
BROOKLYN, April 21—“How dare you care more about some traffic than my daughter’s life?” screamed Kyam Livingston’s mother Anita Neal in a kkkop’s face as protesters took over an intersection and refused to move, despite the kkkops’ attempts to clear us out. As the rally held its ground, our chants rang out: “if we don’t get it, shut it down! For Kyam, shut it down!” Pedestrians on the sidewalks stood and watched, cheering and applauding the act of standing up to the police.
Members of Progressive Labor Party joined with the Justice for Kyam Livingston Committee in this monthly demonstration, demanding that those responsible for the death of 37-year-old Kyam be charged for their racist crime. We have joined family and friends in fighting back against this example of systemic racial injustice every month, and more, since Kyam’s death July 21, 2013. We called out the whole rotten racist capitalist system as the reason there is no justice for Kyam and other victims of kkkop terror.
Today, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson came under withering fire for his failure to bring any charges against the NYPD cops who were Kyam’s jailers. They refused her pleas for medical attention and are thus responsible for her death. Thompson has shown his loyalty to this racist system and the police force that serves it. A PL speaker linked Kyam’s death to the other police murders that have taken place just down Church Avenue where we stood. Shantel Davis and Kiki Gray were killed by NYPD and no charges were brought in these cases as well. Outrage was expressed at the Brooklyn DA’s recommendation that killer kkkop Peter Liang serve no jail time after he was convicted of murdering Akai Girley.
Fight with Multiracial Unity
The anger over inaction by the DA boiled over as Kyam’s mother led the crowd into the street. Traffic stopped and drivers waited for balloons to be released. One bus driver gave us a raised fist of approval. After holding our ground against the pressure from the cops, they eventually were forced to back down! The march slowly returned to the rally location on the sidewalk. A young Black man approached us and asked, in awe, how we were able to get them to back off. A PL’er and member of the Kyam Committee responded simply, “multi-racial unity.”
Indeed, what do the bosses and their Killer kkkops fear the most? A united multi-racial working class that is angry and ready to fight back!
PLers called on anti-racist fighters to join our May Day March happening later that month in an anti-police murder contingent. Destroying this evil system, it was pointed out, and building an egalitarian anti-racist, anti-sexist system is the only way we will get justice.
PLP salutes all of the families who are fighting back. We planned to join the rally called by Brooklyn Legal Aide Lawyers and members of the Girley family protesting DA Thompson’s choice to give no jail time to the convicted killer cop.
Fighting back for justice is an important and necessary thing but fighting to overthrow capitalism is the fight that will end racist police terror once and for all.
We will be back on May 21 and ask anti-racist fighters to join us there!
On May 1, 30 enthusiastic and militant comrades carried red flags, banners with messages related to the International Workers’ Day and communist revolution, and chanted revolutionary PLP slogans, all well-received by workers. We handed out 7,000 flyers denouncing the fascist conditions faced by Mexico’s working class and workers worldwide and offered the Party’s solution. Lastly, we made plans to continue the struggle. Following is the flyer we distributed.
Smash Capitalist Hell with International Working-Class Unity
Under capitalism our minds are chained to the racism, individualism, nationalism and sexism of the system. These ideological chains, in addition to dividing us, weaken our forces as a working class. The May Day celebration is a call for the international unity of the whole working class to shed the nationalist yoke and fight for an egalitarian society: communism
Capitalism wreaks havoc on the life of the working class, through exploitation, misery, violence, hopelessness and death, out of which it generates tremendous profits for the capitalists.
Due to the labor reform, working conditions in Mexico are increasingly unstable; workers must work longer hours for lower salaries. According to the Autonomous National University of Mexico Center for Multidisciplinary Analysis (CAM), 66 percent of the employed population earn minimum salaries or less.
In another study, CAM reports that in 33 years the earning power of salaries has accumulated a loss of 79.20 percent, which means that to purchase basic necessities workers must work 52 hours a week.
Amongst the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) workers here work the most hours annually, with an average of 2,226 hours, but have the lowest salaries, averaging $12,850 a year, or $1.01 an hour. This is less than half of what a worker earns in Chile.
Mexican capitalists and their politicians have turned the working class here into the most exploited, impoverished and cheapest in the world, a condition allowing them to reap the greatest profits, attract investors and compete with the bosses elsewhere, such as those in China.
Conditions are even worse for the nearly 6.6 million workers who are unemployed or lack adequate employment. Capitalism will not provide employment or education to 7.5 million youth between 15 to 29 years of age who are the most vulnerable to capitalism’s individualistic culture. Ultimately many end up murdered or criminalized by the bosses’ media, according to the national Institute of Statistics and Geography.
As workers’ misery increases, so do the bosses’ profits and all their luxuries. According to La Jornada (3/14/2016), by the end of 2015 profits for Mexico’s leading corporations increased 8 percent.
As the exploitation intensifies and profits increase, the gap between rich and poor grows. Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world. One percent of the population owns 43 percent of all the country’s wealth. According to Oxfam, half the population lives in poverty.
Workers who struggle against these injustices, fighting for their rights, suffer disappearances, murders, repression or jailing, as was the case of the CNTE teachers, student teachers, electricians, IPN students, indigenous communities and Atenco peasants. When capitalism is in crisis, fascism is the order of the day
One might think conditions couldn’t get worse, but the global capitalist crisis and sharpening of imperialist rivalry will lead inevitably to another world war in which capitalists will destroy the lives of millions of workers, the means of production and natural resources.
For workers, the fight against this criminal system is a matter of life or death. We must organize ourselves as a class as part of the international communist Progressive Labor Party. It’s imperative to destroy capitalist exploitation to build a new egalitarian society.
Capitalists promote the idea that communism failed, but it’s capitalism that has failed. The specter of communism still haunts the capitalist vultures and the communist demonstrations organized internationally by PLP are a beacon of hope for the millions of workers worldwide. The working class will remain exploited until we set ourselves free from capitalism; communism is the key to our liberation. Until victory!
Long live communism! Death to capitalism! For a revolutionary communist May Day!
