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Tubman & Brown: revolt against slavery with multiracial unity
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- 24 September 2023 150 hits
This coming October 17 marks the 163nd anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry. A multiracial group of abolitionists led by John Brown wanted to spark an uprising against slavery that would spread throughout the South. It was a revolt showing the need for militant, antiracist, multiracial, revolutionary struggle! The fight against racist terror continues with the rebellions sparked by police murders this summer. As workers recognize the power of unity, the cops crack down harder on protests.
The Southern enslaving class was terrified by the Harpers Ferry raiders’ 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 fighters 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 workers were completely equal. He put
this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y., 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, reaching out to Black abolitionists and former enslaved workers.
Tubman single-handedly freed 300 enslaved workers
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 to 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 the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 enslaved workers to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, “I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger.” 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 Harpers 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 rebels petrified enslavers
To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. 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 work- ers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.
Today the “outside agitators” are Progressive Labor Party (PLP) communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, Black nationalists and sellout union “leaders” to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?
Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the “natural” segregation capitalist society promotes. 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.
Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradictions. Workers still often live in neighbor- hoods separated by “race” but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul “versus” country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.
Class struggle trumps racism
As in Tubman and Brown’s time, racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multiracial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latin workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to rehire all the fired immigrant workers!
In 2008 in the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers went on strike for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP had organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure. The fight against police brutality is a protracted class war still being waged today. It is the same war left unfinished by Tubman and Brown. This summer PLP joined the militant anti- racist fightback against the kkkops, who in less than a year’s time, stole the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake, and countless others. The multiracial character of these protests are glimmers of the revolutionary potential of the working class.
John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach us many lessons that are valuable to antiracists today. First, militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nation-wide.
The second is that multiracial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, Black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed word to their friends and helped harbor fugitive slaves.
PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multiracial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant antiracist demonstrations, build a multiracial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery porters did against slavery—taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.
Join Progressive Labor Party
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party. Today’s supporters of antiracist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 161 years ago — that revolutionaries, like the raiders then and PLP now, are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multiracial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.
This is the introductory article of a series on climate change. Worldwide climate catastrophe is having its biggest impact on the working class, especially Black and brown workers and youth. This issue is integral to the international working-class struggle against racism, sexism and imperialism and for the revolutionary transformation of society. This means building the fight for communism- here, there, and everywhere. Our lives depend on it.
This July's global average temperature of 16.95C (62.51F) was 0.33C (0.59F) higher than the earlier record set in July 2019, when the global average temperatures hit 16.63C (32F). From Phoenix, Az. (July, 2023 average high of 114 degrees, low of 90 degrees) to fires in Greece to Iraq (Baghdad average high was 119 degrees) and Pakistan (still damaged by floods that occurred in 2022), the build-up of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere has led to scorching temperatures and massive flooding. Last summer alone, heat waves in Europe killed 61,000 people and in Pakistan 1700 people died from the worst rains in decades.
Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe!
Somewhere around 97% of all climate scientists in the world agree that it’s not by chance that one disaster after another has been occurring over the past number of decades. What is at the core of this rapid climate change? You guessed it. The unbridled, racist and unrestrained drive for profits, that is at the center of capitalism, has led coal, gas, and oil companies to continue their exploration and extraction of fossil fuels. The political lackeys in national governments and the financial institutions that “own” them, have all reneged on their pledges to reduce carbon emissions in the name of war (Ukraine) and profits. Most of the 59.1 million people internally displaced in 2021, (virtually all poor industrial workers, agricultural workers and often people of color) according to the United Nations, were victims of climate change events. China, to put the icing on the cake, has doubled down on the use of coal, which is plentiful in their land.
Millions March to Fight Against Climate Catastrophe!
The past year has seen 8 million people involved in protests and actions around the world demanding change. Will these demonstrations be enough? The answer is no. Leaving the decision-making to capitalist governments throughout the world is like asking a zebra to change its stripes. Much of the leadership of the environmental movement is linked with so-called liberal governments or fake leftists that will mislead people into the ballot box and not challenge the fundamental cause of climate catastrophe, world-wide capitalism. The oil companies and all climate polluters have too much at stake to change course soon or at all. Future articles will discuss many aspects of climate change and discuss some possible solutions. However, one thing remains clear, as long as we allow capitalism to rule the world, we have little or no chance for a living and sustainable environment.
The Progressive Labor Party worldwide, welcomes the task of providing revolutionary leadership to the climate catastrophe movement, connecting it to racism, sexism, imperialist war and the class struggle. The best hope for humanity is the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism throughout the world. Only then can we build a sustainable egalitarian economy that eliminates unchecked capitalist greed forever. Join us.
Fighting my cynicism: ‘I’m glad I went!’
When I first heard about the climate march I have to admit - I didn’t want to go. I often get very cynical when I participate in these marches. However, the Party made a push for us to participate - and I am glad they did. As school started I began to talk to students and teachers about the march. Some of the teachers were excited.
One of the teachers asked why I would want to go to this. They had the same mentality as I did. We talked about how we need to rebuild the organizing culture in our school and this might be a good first step. She agreed. More importantly, we talked about how the politics of “End fossil fuels” was not enough and that we need to be there to inject more radical politics. I showed her our flyer and she enthusiastically agreed that capitalism was the problem, but she wasn’t sure that communism was the solution. In the end the Party’s push to attend forced me to think more deliberately about how I am going to organize with coworkers at my school. I have to remember that even though the bosses right now control most of these marches, they give us opportunities to build our Party. One day we will be leading thousands to not just call for an end to fossil fuels, but call for an end to capitalism with communist revolution.
‘Looking for a political home’
After experiencing the Climate Change March through the communist contingent of Progressive Labor Party, as partners we exchanged some encouraging moments. We saw thousands of workers and students. One of us witnessed a dear comrade and PLP member fight through their fears of social anxiety and have a dialogue with a new person regarding the Pparty’s ideas of fighting back against racism, sexism and climate change, exposing truths and lies bred by capitalism. This moment made us remember that strength comes from our sharp politics and the courage starts with us the working class.
The other one of us spoke with an unemployed worker in their late twenties who mentioned that part of why they came to the march was to identify fighting organizations they could join. People were walking up to us to grab a CHALLENGE or leaflet after they heard the politics of our chants explicitly calling the bosses out. That made us think that we were doing the right thing. So many more workers and youth like that worker are looking for a political home.
By putting this need of our class over our own fears of reaching out to more workers we will open the door for masses more to find what they are looking for to smash the profit system that makes us suffer: PLP!
Workers respond to communist ideas
Our PLP contingent was organized with great chants and vitality. A group of workers from a housekeepers’ union took our flier. One pointed to the PLP logo and the word “communism” and said, “This is good.”
One Challenge seller spoke with three demonstrators who all gave their names and phone numbers to be contacted by the Party.
A contingent of Columbia University graduate student workers in the UAW chanted, “Up with the planet, down with the bosses.”
Our Party showed up and the demonstration was better for it.
OAK LAWN, September 6- A multiracial and intergenerational group of antiracist fighters, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), gathered this evening to denounce the racist Oak Lawn Police Department once again. Chants of "Justice for Hadi," and "Justice for Murod," resounded throughout the neighborhood. Murod Kurdi, a 28-year-old Arab worker was struck & killed by a white drunk driver last June. His killer was given a traffic ticket and released by one of the KKKops that had beaten and nearly killed Hadi Abuatelah last year (See CHALLENGE, 9/20). The Oak Lawn Police is an example of a growing fascist movement that marginalizes and attacks mainly Black and Brown working-class communities and immigrant workers while being used to oppress all workers.
Inside the police station, Murod Kurdi's mother spoke about how her son was killed and how the drunk driver caller her lawyer, instead of 911 to seek help for the man who had just hit with her speeding car. Her testimony was abruptly stopped after three minutes, and the kkkop board would not allow her to finish her testimony. In fact, they stopped any further public comment and ordered the kkkops to escort us out of the building. Murod's mother's bravery is even more poignant in front of these appointed cronies who acted with malice and prejudice. We will attend the next court hearing in October of Murod's killer in solidarity with his family and friends.
There is a crystal-clear connection to the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist terror unleashed against workers here and on an international level. The imperialist bosses in the United States and across Europe have for generations murdered and displaced workers across the oil-rich Middle East to consolidate their power over resources, markets and labor. To achieve this, they have needed to promote a vicious racism against workers in that part of the world, to keep us divided against our common exploiters. Now as Russian and Chinese imperialists are encroaching on what was US and European bosses’ sphere of influence, they need to ramp up racist terror against Arab and Muslim workers even harder to try and keep their grip.
For the imperialist bosses fighting over Latin America and Middle-East resources, land, oil and industrial might, workers' lives are cheap, here and there. Let us not fall for their racist tactics, whether they are from Trump MAGA racists or liberals who defend the racist Democratic Party which even more culpable in causing workers to be displaced all over the world.
Under capitalism, there is no justice for the working class. Justice will come when workers revolt and smash the bosses and establish a communist society free from racism and exploitation. Communism will mean the working class and its communist party will outlaw racism, sexism, and exploitation. Join us.
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Editorial: G20 Summit-U.S. has less leverage against imperialist rivals
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- 24 September 2023 151 hits
The downward spiral of U.S. imperialism was exposed yet again at the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in New Delhi, India. European bosses, along with capitalist bosses from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, refused to back a statement blaming Russian imperialists for the war in Ukraine (Politico 9/14). Meanwhile, the Chinese and Russian heads of state snubbed the summit by sending junior officials in their place. They were busy recruiting more oil-rich, climate-hostile capitalist regimes into their BRICS alliance, a growing threat to U.S. dominance.
The G20, founded in 1999 in the wake of economic crises in Asia, is a working group of the most powerful capitalist economies. It’s dedicated to making the global profit system more stable for the capitalist class. But it was doomed to fail from the start, since any system driven by short-term maximum profit is intrinsically unstable. In a period of rising inter-imperialist rivalry and coming world war, “multilateral” coalitions like the G20 are useless for solving international crises, whether it’s Covid or climate or a proxy war in Ukraine. Workers everywhere must reject all imperialists. The only side our class can afford to take is the communist side!
G20 backslide on Russia is a blow to U.S.
In addressing the U.S.-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, the world leaders wound up with a soft call for “territorial integrity” and “peace and stability”--a big step back from last year’s G20, which “deplored” Russian “aggression” against Ukraine.
Ukraine’s bosses rejected the resolution outright
The reality is that the U.S. bosses no longer have the leverage to use the G20 to attack Russia (Le Monde, 9/10). As Ukraine’s military counteroffensive stalls, Russian bosses are out-maneuvering sanctions by trafficking oil to the international market across the Northern Sea. Placing oil profits over workers’ interests, they’re using non-ice class tankers in icy waters, increasing the risk of a pollution disaster (FT, 9/15).
Imperialists jockey for influence
In an effort to shore up world leaders' confidence in the U.S., India Prime Minister Narendra Modi was ushered in to present the U.S.-backed rail-and-port deal to connect India to the Middle East and from there to Europe. This Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor is a direct challenge to the Chinese bosses’ Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Economic Times, 9/12).
China’s ruling class, playing up its strength as the world’s second-largest economy, created the BRI to offer an alternative to Western debt traps for emerging capitalist economies. It provides direct investment in roads, ports, hospitals, industries, and other sectors. The debtor states’ bosses, driven by their own capitalist need for profit, are more interested in securing Chinese capital loans than completing infrastructure projects (The Print, 1/27). More than ten years in and after spending $240 billion in 22 countries, the BRI has saddled these economies with enormous debt and has yet to build a whole lot of “road” or “bridges.”
War and climate refugees
As the G20 trumpeted the inclusion of the African Union as a full member, thousands of workers were killed by massive flooding in Libya. In Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, there could be an additional 143 million climate migrants by 2050 (Brookings, 7/25/19). Capitalist corporations in cahoots with the G20 nations are responsible for 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But despite a summer filled with global climate disasters, the G20 killed a resolution for a more aggressive phaseout of fossil fuels (MSN, 9/11).
Kenya President William Ruto called out representatives of the world’s three largest emitters: China, the U.S., and the European Union. “Those who produce the garbage,” Ruto said, “refuse to pay their bills” (PBS, 9/5). But French President Emmanuel Macron punched back against “this rising state of mind” that “climate change is only the responsibility of the West” (TIME, 9/10). With the biggest emitters all addicted to short-term profits from fossil fuels, it’s clear that capitalism has no solution for global warming.
The devastation of climate change is felt most by Black, Latin, and Indigenous women, men, and children. Workers can’t wait for or survive on the bosses’ promises. The salvation of our class will never come from capitalist rulers, but from militant fightback and communist revolution.
Communist cooperation is the only alternative
To deal with climate change, imperialist forced displacement, and the host of issues bred by capitalist accumulation and competition, Progressive Labor Party must harness the one tool that can solve the centuries-old problems wrought by the profit system: the collective genius of the working class. Once the international working class has seized state power, first on our agenda will be abolishing money, the material basis for commodity production and racist and sexist inequality.
Communist global summits will make the “last first,” ensuring that regions of the world with abundant food stores and manufactured goods redistribute them to workers with less. We will enlist countless doctors, nurses, engineers, and teachers from around the world into service–without pay–to help and empower workers in every corner of the globe, and to expand human potential for all ages, from infancy to the elderly. Our meetings, conferences, and discussions today are the seeds of these future summits for our class. Join us!
