LOS ANGELES, August 27  — We are a group of students, educators, workers, and union members who meet weekly to study Marxism and put it into practice by building working-class solidarity with Southern California supermarket workers.

For several months, we have been committed to reading works such as Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism.  Through these readings, we understand how the economic collapse of 2008 and subsequent recession and high rate of unemployment are not accidents, but examples of the repeating cycle of boom and bust that characterize capitalism. This system relies on unemployed workers as a reserve army of labor for the ruling class. We also discussed how these crises are exaggerated by the need for growing profits for bankers and big corporations, as well as the need for imperialist powers to initiate wars of aggression.

We committed ourselves to supporting workers of Ralphs, Albertsons, and Vons supermarkets in Southern California. They may be going on strike against a proposed contract that aims to remove affordable health care and pension plans.

We hosted a Forum/Action Planning group. We discussed how each crisis means more give-backs and cutbacks for the working class in order to sustain the bosses’ profits. The presentation incorporated many ideas from Marx and Lenin to help put the current situation in the context of the workings of capitalism.

In particular, we focused on the austerity measures recently proposed by the U.S. federal government. These cuts are part of a larger attack on workers that aim to further destroy the strength of unions. They are a tool of the ruling class to make the working class pay for the financial criminality of banks and businesses.

After that, we discussed how we would use this understanding of capitalism to help the community fight back against the bosses’ attacks. We will be more involved with the supermarket workers. There was a good discussion on whether or not our goal was to win a strike, or to win the workers and community closer to communist ideas. All benefits won through reforms by previous generations of workers are eventually taken back from future generations. PLP fights for communism, which runs on workers’ needs, and is the lasting solution to capitalism, which is based on bosses’ profits. 

We will continue to have these discussions openly with our comrades and friends to develop more cohesive ideas when we go to the picket lines. We plan on doing house visits and weekly community meetings to discuss how the attack on the grocery workers is part of a bigger attack against the working class as a whole.

As a result of these recent events, we developed our political understanding and created more solidarity among different types of workers here. Many grocery workers and others reacted positively to our efforts to support them. They had been feeling disempowered due to constant attacks from the bosses and the misleadership of the union. But as a result of PLP’s leadership, many workers have shown more militancy and enthusiasm to collectively struggle against their bosses. We will struggle with all working people to envision what a communist world will be like.

OAK FOREST, ILLINOIS, August 12 — Thirty-five workers, students, patients and PLP members protested Cook County’s plans to close Oak Forest Hospital.  Oak Forest is the public hospital that serves the south suburbs of Chicago, an area home to many working-class, unemployed, and black residents.  It is a lifeline for people with no insurance who will not receive adequate services from the private hospitals in the area. 

Our protest started out on the campus of Oak Forest in front of the long-term patient ward where many in-house patients have already been moved and subsequently died. We then moved to the emergency room where Cook County police stopped us and demanded that we move off campus.  In high spirits, we relocated to the busy intersection at the hospital entrance, where we passed out hundreds of fliers and copies of CHALLENGE and were met with many honks of support.

The government of Cook County, led by Toni Preckwinkle, want to close the hospital and have uninsured patients travel to Stroger Hospital at least 45 minutes away.  This plan will ensure the death of many sick patients who need to travel that far to be stabilized. Our protest called out Preckwinkle for what she is — a murderer.

In a capitalist society where wars and bank profits are a priority over the lives of workers, we should not be surprised by the plan to close Oak Forest Hospital.  The racist and sexist disregard for the health of these predominantly poor black, Latino and women workers exposes  the ruling-class plan for a fascist system. It’s a plan that means the death of workers who are unnecessary for their profits. 

A public health system under capitalism is solely based on the needs of profit.  Communism, on the other hand, values the well-being and contributions of all workers.  Only communism will provide the health system necessary to make that a reality.

On August 16th, the Illinois Health Review Board will vote whether to grant Cook County permission to officially close the hospital based on the rulers’ needs. The battle will continue, no matter the outcome. (See update in next issue.)

MEXICO CITY, August 7 — “We don’t want crumbs, we want the whole cake!” With these words at a communist school attended by nearly 30 workers and their relatives alongside members of Progressive Labor Party, a comrade from Mexico summed up the class struggle at the heart of the PL Summer Project here.

The school covered political economy, the rise of fascism, the line of PL, and the necessity of a single international communist party. It followed a week of activity in an industrial area near Mexico City, an impoverished, drug-infested community of mostly factory workers. As we visited the Party’s base in many houses and several workplaces, and then met with workers in the evening at a comrade’s home, it was obvious how capitalism had failed to meet the community’s most basic needs. Of every ten students who begin primary school, only one will graduate from high school. In many houses, water and electricity are sporadic.  Some neighborhoods have none at all. 

One worker we visited, Roberto, is a brickmaker.  His neighborhood has no paved streets, no school. The bricks he makes go elsewhere; his own home is made of wood, plastic sheets, corrugated metal, and cardboard, with a dirt floor.  For nearly two hours, Roberto talked about all the things his community lacked, from public transportation to sports facilities. He said that the three major parties’ local politicians buy votes with pre-election pizza parties, but deliver nothing of substance to the workers.  Roberto is a regular CHALLENGE reader and agreed to take several papers to distribute.

Jorge is a factory worker — “a true communist,” as a comrade who works with him said after a small but intense struggle at their workplace.  As a young man with no dependents, he volunteered to give up his own job to someone who needed it more.  After the brief struggle, however, both workers kept their jobs. Our discussion with Jorge included his family members, all of them eager to ask questions about PL. We offered our analysis of the perpetual crisis of overproduction in capitalism. The system’s relentless drive for maximum profits explains why skilled Mexican factory workers, once relatively well-paid, are now losing their jobs or getting lower salaries. It also explains why the workers’ children, even those with university degrees, cannot find work, much like their cohorts in the United States, Europe, and worldwide. 

This week of meetings and visits was very productive.  We had inspiring conversations and distributed lots of literature.  With comrades from a number of different countries participating, we showed PL’s international character and built solidarity with our friends.  Despite the pervasive sexism under capitalism, we found that husbands consistently encouraged their wives and children to participate in our discussions. We were also humbled by the generosity and hospitality of these workers with limited means.  In all cases, people agreed to read CHALLENGE and to show it to their friends. 

All workers and members of PL can learn much from our comrades from Mexico. They show how industrial workers — armed with class hatred, communist ideas, and a single international party — represent the only threat to capitalism. They are the future of the working class.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, July 29 — The last day of the PLP Summer Project’s freedom school marked a big advance in organizing around the anti-racist, anti-sexist ideas urgently needed by workers in Haiti. After an inspirational class, much of it student-led, teachers and students broke through the cement-block walls of their tilekol (“little school,” in Kreyol). They marched to the State University Hospital of Haiti, where they showed militant support for workers in the fourth week of a strike for lost wages and decent patient care.

The day capped a week of critical, participatory, political education that involved teams of Haitian and visiting teachers and about 50 eager young people. As opposed to traditional, top-down schooling under capitalism, which imposes conformity with the bosses’ reactionary ideology and out-and-out lies, the tilekol aimed to equip its students to grapple with reality and change the world.

Our school was rooted in the practice of communist educators in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, whose influence later ranged from the Freedom Summer schools in the U.S. civil rights movement to the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian writer who called for “transformative education” to liberate workers’ minds. 

Our first attempts to teach were bogged down by the challenge of translation in up to four languages (English, French, Kreyòl, Spanish), and also by traditional lecturing that was too dominated by the teachers. But by the second and third weeks, we gradually shifted to a more participatory style.

Seated on worn public school benches, three or four to a desk, the students became enthusiastically engaged in small-group discussions, writing projects, and video productions. Ignoring the heat, teachers and students together learned songs of struggle.

The students’ evaluations of their tilekol were moving to hear. The key word was “pride” — in their newly-discovered capacity to analyze the horrific situation in Haiti and the wider capitalist world, and to understand how they could organize a movement to defend themselves and their families of workers, unemployed, and homeless residents of tent camps.

The students learned about the history of imperialism in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, how capitalism works, including the labor theory of value. We learned how it uses racism to divide and exploit workers and the need to end sexism and violence against women as well as the differences between charity, aid, and solidarity. We also discovered the role played in Haiti today by the police and the occupying army of MINUSTAH, the United Nations’ “stabilization” mission in Haiti that functions as the brutal arm of imperialism.

They learned about The Communist Manifesto and the Paris Commune, and how those 19th-century words and deeds were relevant to their own experience.

Throughout the freedom school’s final session, the classroom echoed with the students’ dramatic production of the day before. It was inspired by a recent incident where MINUSTAH troops had chased student protestors with tear gas into their tent camp and ultimately killed a child there. As the tilekol’s students staged their theater in the Summer Project health clinic’s open-air waiting room, every seat was filled, and a dozen people watched through windows and the doorway.

In the spirit of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, we then took the school into the streets, as we had in a previous visit to the hospital workers’ union hall (CHALLENGE, Aug. 17). We surged outside for the six-block walk to the hospital, where striking workers were waiting to start a courtyard press conference.  The strikers’ leaders lined up some of our visiting teachers for speeches of solidarity, translated into French.  That was good, and seen on national TV, in contrast to the mostly negative media coverage of the strike. 

But then things really took off, as we began chanting in English, “Same Enemy, Same Fight: Workers of the World Unite!”  We’d also learned it in Kreyòl, so one of us stammered out, “Menm lennmi, menm lit; travayè nan lemond fè nou youn!”  The crowd took it, workers and tilekòl students alike, belting it out as one. Someone began singing the satirical “Poukisa?”, asking why the bourgeoisie’s dogs ate better than they did, and the students ran with it. The workers joined in, elderly women strikers smiling into our students’ eyes as they sang together. 

Then came the dancing march, as they do it in South America and Africa.  By the time it ended, we had circled the hospital grounds three times, singing all the way, and the hospital’s police unit had called in UDMO, the regime’s paramilitary thugs.  Students responded without fear, changing their anti-MINUSTAH song to: “Why is UDMO killing us? We can’t go on this way.” We found ourselves marching ten blocks to picket the Ministry of Health, with the local press trailing. The reporters carefully edited out the inspiring scenes on the march, but they couldn’t erase the working-class unity and communist spirit of the day.

The students were indeed proud of all this — and also sad, as one 14-year-old said, that there would be no tilekòl for her on Monday morning. But the freedom school is not ending, after all. Local and international organizers of the Summer Project made a plan to continue tilekòl into August and beyond. Local teacher teams will keep it going, along with guest lecturers from strikes, tent camps, unions, and community-based organizations.  Every one of our students signed up! 

On this wave of hope, as we prepared to return, we knew that we had started something important, with comrades together from Haiti,  the U.S., and Mexico.  Where would it end?  One student, a young Seventh Day Adventist, told us that he’d heard a lot of bad things about communism, but that communism would be better than what they have in Haiti today. We teachers had learned a huge lesson from our freedom school students and from the hospital strikers. What Freire called “transformation” — our ability to change the world — lies in our own hands, united in struggle.J

 (In later issues: more comments from participants in the Haiti freedom school and clinic.)