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BLACK AND RED, UNTOLD HISTORY PART III: King’s class contradictions
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- 16 March 2024 681 hits
Ruling-class historians have segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
This series aims to reunite the history of communism with antiracism. Part I explored how the fight to free Scottsboro Boys was ignited by the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party. See Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression to find out more.
Part II explored how the international communist movement was the impetus of the civil rights movement. It excerpts from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the essay, “The Civil Rights Movement” by researcher Davarian L. Baldwin at Trinity College.
The communist movement both helped inspire and was shaped by the antiracist struggle for civil rights in the U.S. Martin Luther King Jr. and many of the leading civil rights figures were influenced by the Communist Party (CP). Rosa Parks had attended Communist Party meetings and been trained as an activist at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee which had been supported by members and friends of the CP. Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levinson and Jack O’Dell, who all played important roles in King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were active at various times in the communist movement.
Communist leadership in the Jim Crow south
Just as important was the 25-year history of the Communist Party in Alabama led by Black workers leading many struggles against racism and building several organizations including the International Labor Defense, the Sharecroppers Union, the International Workers Order, the League of Young Southerners, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress that in total involved around 20,000 mainly Black workers. These organizations were at their peak in the 1930’s, but the experience of fighting against racism and for the needs of the working-class laid the basis for the fight against Jim Crow laws in the 1950’s and 60’s.
The Party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the…concerns of black people.
Communists believed that organizing the working-class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of Black workers….
In short, American Communism was a movement that grew out of what the historian Robin D. G. Kelley, the author of “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression,” calls “the most despised and dispossessed elements of American society.” “It was the Black workers drawn to the party, Professor Kelley argues, who shaped its political choices as much as … the Communist International (NY Times 6/6).
Like the Scottsboro campaign 20 years earlier the Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated when Rosa Parks refused to move to the Black section of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, drew world-wide attention to the fight against racism in the segregated South. The fight for civil rights became a major embarrassment to the U.S. ruling-class. At the time, China, the world’s largest country was communist-led, as was the Soviet Union. These two worker super powers provided leadership and support to anti-imperialist movements across Africa, Asia, and South America.
U.S. rulers forced to support Civil Rights Movement
The U.S tried to counter the growing communist-led movements by championing capitalist democracy, but at every turn the racist conditions forced on Black workers in the United States and the increasing demonstrations against those conditions undercut the U.S. bosses’ attempts to gain support.
Under increasing pressure, the U.S. bosses were forced into tacitly supporting the growing civil rights movement. At the same time, they were terrified of the movement that brought together hundreds of thousands of Black and white workers and students in the fight against segregation. The U.S. ruling-class, between a rock and a hard place, tried to gain control of the movement by both working with and threatening Martin Luther King.
John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson worked with Martin Luther King to end official Jim Crow. The bosses’ legal arm led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, spied on and tried to disrupt and control the movement by building anti-communism. The bosses’ goal was to limit the movement to blaming the smaller Southern bosses for all of the racism in the country and ignore the racist conditions in the North.
Liberal misleaders try attacked antiracists and communists
The ruling-class went after every leader and institution connected to the civil rights movement to try to keep it under control. Martin Luther King as the leading figure of the movement came under particular attack and pressure.
In 1963 King bowed to the wishes of the Kennedy Administration and fired SCLC employee Jack O’Dell after the FBI alleged that he was a communist. King also agreed to cease direct communication with his friend and closest white advisor, Stanley Levison, although he eventually resumed contact with him in March 1965. FBI surveillance and bugs tracked King’s political associations and produced evidence of King’s extramarital sexual activities—information that was later leaked to some reporters.
In 1965 King faced questions from journalists on Meet the Press about his association with Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, which had been branded a ‘‘Communist training school’’ on billboards that appeared throughout Alabama during the Selma to Montgomery March and showed King attending a Highlander workshop. (Stanford University King Encyclopedia)
Communist leadership was instrumental in Civil Rights movement
King was a contradictory figure. He publicly professed anti-communism, yet he was undoubtedly influenced by the communist movement and recognized that communism reflected the desires of an exploited working-class oppressed by racism.
Indeed, it may be that communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert. Communism should challenge us to be more concerned about social justice. However much is wrong with communism, we must admit that it arose as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1847 by Marx and Engels, emphasizes throughout how the middle-class has exploited the lower-class. Communism in society is a classless society. Along with this goes a strong attempt to eliminate racial prejudice. Communism seeks to transcend the superficialities of race and color, and you are able to join the Communist Party whatever the color of your skin or the quality of your blood.” (MLK speech “Can a Christian be a Communist”)
At the end of the famed march from Selma to Montgomery, King gave perhaps his clearest speech on the roots of racism as a tool used by the bosses to divide the working-class:
Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then…the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem…to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.
Later King began to expand his public activity to address the war in Vietnam and attempted to extoll the U.S. to end the war on communism.
[I]n the summer of 1965 the press reported King’s off-the-cuff remarks to a Southern Christian Leadership Conference rally in Virginia: ‘‘We’re not going to defeat Communism with bombs and guns and gases.… We must work this out in the framework of our democracy’’ (‘‘Dr. King Declares’’).
In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King decried
America’s ‘‘morbid fear of communism,’’ arguing that it prevented people from embracing a ‘‘revolutionary spirit and … declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.’’ (Stanford University King Encyclopedia)
Ruling class violence met with antiracist workers’ rebellion
While there are so many unanswered questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, like the killing of Malcolm X, it coincided with an expansion in King’s political focus from civil rights for Black workers in the United States to fighting for
economic rights for the working class and opposing imperialism. King was killed in Memphis where he was actively supporting striking Black sanitation workers.
As the ruling-class pressured King and ultimately murdered him, the working-class became increasingly politicized. Rebellions of Black workers rocked Newark, Watts, Harlem and Detroit and U.S Soldiers were rebelling against the war in Vietnam. In spite of the bosses’ attempts to smother the movement, the working-class was rising up. The bosses may have hoped that killing King would stop the movement but instead the attack hardened the resolve of the working-class, particularly Black workers, to continue to fight.
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Teachers fight against genocide and confront zionists at union meeting
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- 16 March 2024 680 hits
WASHINGTON, DC, March 6—Today a bold elementary school teacher fought to present a ceasefire resolution to stop genocide in Gaza at his union meeting (the Montgomery County Education Association). Over 200 teachers – many more than usual – attended this meeting in response to the controversy over the runup to this resolution. This struggle demonstrated that fighting Israeli fascism and its US ruling class backers must be on everyone’s agenda. The communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought revolutionary analysis to this activity, arguing that only armed struggle for communist revolution will ultimately defeat fascism.
Antiracists versus zionists
The teacher had submitted a request to present the NBI (new business item) containing the resolution for ceasefire back in January. After months of setbacks and redirections from union leaders, the resolution was finally cleared for presentation and ensuing debate at the March representative assembly meeting for the MCEA. The teacher worked with the union vice president who would chair the meeting to determine the best way to present the resolution. But the Jewish Community Relations Council of Washington DC (JCRC), a local pro-genocide zionist organization, got wind of this upcoming resolution from pro-Israel teachers, some of whom threatened to quit the union if the resolution was even brought up for debate!
The JCRC had already succeeded in pressing the Montgomery County school administration to place several teachers on administrative leave based on spurious antisemitism charges (CHALLENGE, 1/17 & 2/28).
The zionists set their sights on intimidating the union leaders into ruling that consideration of the resolution “out of order”. They issued a leaflet filled with distortions and lies and called for a pro-Israel rally outside the union meeting. The vice president gave in to the pressure and declared the resolution “out of order” and moved on to another agenda item. One angry teacher leaped from her seat objecting to that decision and was threatened with being removed from the meeting! Other teachers walked out of the meeting in disgust at their leaders. The lame excuse the vice president and the union lawyer gave for caving to zionist pressure was a bylaw in the Union’s rulebook that says the MCEA is a local entity and doesn’t have authority to speak on anything outside of the “local nexus”.
Antiracists keep fighting!
But the anti-genocide teacher was not done! During the “open mic” portion of the agenda, he declared that the bylaw and the vice president’s decision was what was “out of order” and gave a strong principled speech about the need for the union to come down on the side of oppressed workers everywhere, especially where ongoing genocide was occurring. “We are
antiracist teachers and if we are trying to fight racism we must fight it everywhere we see it—not just our town, county, state or country—we must be international and unite—Jewish, Arab, Black, White and Latin must unite and be one to fight racism!” He read the entire “out of order” ceasefire resolution to many appreciative teachers. Other teachers then stepped to the mic in solidarity. Since the meeting, other teachers have sent emails of support to the resolution’s author, so the future is bright.
Meanwhile, outside the meeting, PLP members and other anti-genocide organizers rallied in support of the teacher, chanting “Stop Killing Babies” and “Workers of the World Unite” while the JCRC members, defended by 11 armed police, pitifully chanted “School Solutions, Not War Resolutions”. PLP members distributed Challenges and PLP flyers and made contacts with new activists, ensuring that more revolutionary consciousness will be raised in the days to come. But an ominous fact was that the Zionists slightly outnumbered the anti-genocide organizers. We must increase our base building and mobilization among our friends and co-workers to ensure that we control the streets when fascists threaten.
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Educator wins back job: A fighting lesson for defeating liberal fascism in the classroom
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- 16 March 2024 586 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 11—After 100 days of being administratively reassigned for pro-Palestine advocacy, an educator was victoriously returned to the classroom. Accused of pushing a political agenda, this educator was abruptly taken from and finally put back into the classroom thanks to a powerful school community fight back.
The liberal ruling class supporters of Israeli fascists openly demonstrated their hypocrisy and repression proclaiming political neutrality while attacking opposition to their genocidal war in Gaza. This double standard was obvious for the whole school to see. Every educator knows that what and how they teach in a classroom is a political act—a Zionist or a capitalist would surely not face any criticism.
The “apolitical” education stance of Big Fascist liberals weaves ideological illusions of inclusion and pluralism to maintain domestic support for their horrific slaughter of our class brothers and sisters abroad. As capitalism goes through increasing crises, it is necessary more than ever to see through and struggle against liberalism in all forms.
Fighting back in a Dark Night
Through this educational struggle, there were valuable lessons to be learned about organizing under increasing fascism. In this Dark Night of political organizing and fightback, there are often very low levels of class consciousness. This includes even sellout unions like the main caucus of the United Federation of Teachers. They prefer under-the-table deals with bosses as well as secrecy and isolation for union members.
Against fears of reprisals from the bosses, workers must bring things to light and defend one another. The working class is weaker when we are not joined together in a multiracial struggle. The bosses count on fragmentation and fear to silence those of us under attack.Though the Union attempted this silencing strategy, it was the work of organizing parents, students, and teachers that ultimately brought the educator back to the school.
Our strategy ultimately paid off with parents agitating against the administration, students gathering their peers, and teachers pressuring the Union to take a class-struggle stance. To fend off ruling class attacks, it is necessary to continuously base build with those who will collectively work to defend one another. To do so makes it possible to force the ruling class to pay a price for their actions while raising consciousness in struggle. Above all, the knowledge that there is collectivity can empower those who otherwise might feel defeated, exhausted, scared, or isolated.
This victory is to be celebrated. However, winning this reform is not nearly enough. Without a revolutionary party to fight for a communist horizon, it is too easy to forget the lessons of struggle in this Dark Night. One such lesson from the past that should not be forgotten is the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, which saw nearly all German teachers enlisting in the project of fascism.
These fascist and nationalist ideas in education continue today as many teachers in the U.S. remain complicit in the schools bombed and students killed in Gaza today. As capitalism continues to deteriorate, teachers will undoubtedly be on the front lines of enforcing violence against migrants, unhoused people, and those caught in the middle of an inter-imperialist war. Against these threats, together with the Progressive Labor Party, we will continue to fight back!
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From NYC to Palestine: Learning to fight, fighting to learn amid genocide & rising fascism
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- 16 March 2024 842 hits
NEW YORK CITY, March 9— This past weekend, members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party participated in mass action and led a study group related to the ongoing genocide against Palestinian workers being carried out by the Zionist bosses of Israel and their imperialist lackeys in the U.S. and Europe.
IDF, NYPD—from Rafah to NYC, HANDS OFF
With 1.5 million Palestinians currently living on top of each other in tents across its city streets, Rafah is currently the most densely populated place in the world, and vulnerable to ground assault. The mass action in Washington Square Park was called in response to these sharpening conditions in Gaza. Despite heavy rain, upwards of 1,200 workers filled the square with militant energy.
Approximately two dozen members and friends attended, distributing close to 900 copies of CHALLENGE, and leading sharp multilingual chants calling for the end of capitalism by way of communist revolution. The surrounding crowd echoed “Fight for communism, now’s the time!” signaling a shift in class consciousness by the working class here.
Ramping up of fascism
This mass demonstration of internationalist unity inspires confidence and hope at a time when both are much needed. From Rafah to NYC, workers around the world are feeling the boot heel of fascism crushing their necks against the curb. This action comes amid the Biden administration's performative charity of dropping aid boxes with malfunctioning parachutes, resulting in the death of civilians, rather than simply allowing aid trucks to pass through the border.
Meanwhile, in NYC, workers suffer inflated food prices, and cuts to social programs, with liberal fascist-in-training Governor Kathy Hochul adding 1000 National Guard soldiers to patrol subways at a time when crime is down. The message—that workers can and should only expect evermore brutish conditions—is clear, and workers are beginning to see the writing on the wall.
How can we build a scientific understanding of internationalism?
Following the action, we held a study-action group that is part of a series that a club of educators has been conducting for the last year. We discussed the limits of nationalism and teased out lively discussions of our position on intersectionality, which seems to be the greatest source of disagreement. Of our 25 participants that day, some we had just met at the action.
We look forward to our next meeting and all in all, it was a reminder that what we do counts.
Fight for communism, now’s the time!
Both the mass action and study group signal an optimistic, qualitative shift, but we must remain prepared, given that such a shift is not necessarily coupled by sharpened contradictions. We must maintain revolutionary optimism and sharpen our understanding of our line. As such, we must treat all base-building opportunities as valuable chances to objectively interrogate our line. With the rise of World War III on the horizon, we cannot shy away from sharp objectivity.
Build the Progressive Labor Party! Fight for communism!
NEW YORK CITY, March 10—The fight against the closing of Downstate Medical Center heated up this week as hundreds of workers, patients, and community members rallied, closing down Clarkson Avenue that runs in front of the hospital. Members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined the rally and distributed all the CHALLENGEs we had. We emphasized the racist nature of attacking healthcare in this largely Black neighborhood that has triple maternal mortality and double infant mortality than that of white workers.
You can’t turn on the news without seeing horrific pictures of death and dying. Thirty thousand are dead in Gaza under ruthless attack from Israeli forces, in the latest of the decades-long wars over Middle Eastern oil. Millions are dead in ongoing wars in the Congo over mineral riches, with each of the big powers arming one side or the other. Now New York State (NYS) wants to cut the guts out of healthcare in central Brooklyn by closing Downstate Hospital. Often it is women and children who bear the brunt in both wars and cutbacks.
These Brooklyn attacks on the working class are connected to world events. Downstate, a safety net hospital, has been shortchanged for years in NYS budgeting. The politicians cry that too much is being spent on healthcare. All this is against a backdrop of $3.8 billion per year going to arm Israel, plus a Biden proposal of $14 billion additional to help in the current war against Palestinians. The U.S. has given Ukraine $46 billion in military aid, but only $1.6 billion in humanitarian aid. Last year, the U.S. gave only $3 billion to the World Food Program. No penny-pinching when it comes to arms, but plenty when it comes to the care of working people.
But women are not just helpless victims. Women in Gaza and Congo are fighting to feed and shelter their families. It was largely women workers at Downstate who spearheaded the fight 11 years ago to keep it open, and they will lead again this time as we fight for our patients and our jobs. Women, (and children grown), will fight alongside men from Gaza and Israel, to Congo, to Ukraine and Russia, to Brooklyn to turn the guns around on the callous leaders who are killing us to feed the imperialist profit machine that needs world domination.
