In class struggle: Unpacking "Violence"
I teach social studies to high school students and I have learned that before we teach historical content it is important to have a conversation with students about violence.

The very first unit that I taught covered the French Revolution, and when we discussed the Reign of Terror I asked my students whether or not they believed that these policies were justified. The majority of the class responded “no” emphatically citing the violence of the Jacobin government.

I realized then that school and media tend to give us a specific perception of violence that highlights interpersonal violence and neglects structural violence. Even property damage may be constituted as “violent” in our popular conception, but poverty, surveillance, policing, and austerity rarely are.

I asked my students what violence is and they gave me lots of examples. Fighting someone, hitting, punching, and shooting is violent. Even words can be violent, they pointed out. I tried to get them to come up with a definition of violence and they agreed that violence is the act of hurting people, but disagreed on whether violence has to be intentional or not. Can policies be violent? Yes, they agreed, they can. What about the existence of homelessness or deny- ing medical care to those without health insurance?

The questions led to lively debate and the class had mixed responses. Students do not need to agree with each other or me, but we should challenge them to think beyond liberal conceptions of violence that erase the state as an actor.

Oftentimes “violence” is ascribed to the reaction to poor conditions, but not to the people and policies that created poor conditions themselves. The police are not violent, but rioters are. The monarchy isn’t violent per se, but revolution aries definitely are. It is important to point out these hypocrisies to students and make sure that topics surrounding resistance and revolution are properly contextualized within the material conditions they occurred in.

I am about to teach about the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union (USSR), a topic that students are likely to have a lot of preconceptions about. I will need to return to this lesson on violence before I teach this topic, and I urge other teachers to broach this idea in class too!

★★★★★

Red Reads: 100-page impression...

With the intention of soon writing a full review I wanted to share first and strong impressions from the first 100 pages of Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts.

The new novel, released in 2022, has been met with much mainstream fan fare.

Self-described as a novel about the “…unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear…” Ng’s book takes place in a dystopian U.S. amidst what can only be described as liberal-fascist (see glossary, page 6) late-stage fascism.

The characters exist in a “fictional” version of the U.S. that is ruled by the “fictional” PACT.

PACT is defined as “…more than a law…a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values…” and is responsible for disappearing anyone who revolts, rebels, or challenges the ideals of PACT.

Based on an early impression I suspect this book is written and championed as a warning cry should democracy not be protected, a rationalization for lesser evil politics.

But what the readers and maybe even the author can’t quite see is this is a road map, a foretelling of what’s to come BECAUSE of lesser-evil politics (see editorial, page 2).

Progressive Labor Party has warned that this is where the road to voting leads.

Is Our Missing Hearts actually the world Big Fascists have dreamed up?

Stay tuned as this red reads on.

★★★★★

New Year, more communism

New Year’s Day, New York and New Jersey Progressive Labor Party members and friends gathered to share uplifting experiences. Reflecting on the year and hopeful for the future, conversations on what it means to be committed to communism, politics and the Party challenged me to think of how I am embodying the politics and struggles beyond events to a more holistic practice in every aspect of my life. Games, music, laughter, and the spirit of hope and the wholesomeness of children’s joy filled the afternoon and night.

Thank you PLP for providing a space for such radical joy and community.

★★★★★

The call by the U.S. President Joe Biden and the United Nations for a multinational invasion of Haiti is motivated in part by their racist dread of yet another refugee crisis. If you ever needed an example of how capitalism is hell on earth, look at what the bosses have done to our class in Haiti. Yet even as capitalist institutions failed at every turn, workers organized a general strike. The masses, led by Progressive Labor Party, (see page 4), will lead the way out of this hellhole.

Working-class lives are expendable for all bosses. For the working class, trading in local gangs for the biggest gangster of them all—U.S. imperialism—is a losing strategy. There is just one choice that can fundamentally change conditions for our class and rid the world of profit and exploitation. The only solution is a communist revolution to smash capitalism and build a new society on the bedrock of need and commitment.

Capitalism in the raw
In July 2021, the assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse, a U.S.-backed stooge, ignited a wave of unrest and terror from organized gangs that now control 60 percent of the country (Foreign Affairs, 12/1/22). The resulting chaos has led to deadly waves of hunger, rape, and extortion, and the lethal return of cholera, an absolutely preventable disease that is spread by contaminated water.

The unelected U.S.-backed prime minister, Ariel Henry, has asked for international military forces to intervene in Haiti to bring “order” to a society in upheaval. Henry had recently cut fuel subsidies and doubled the price of gasoline, which is now in short supply. Haiti’s ruling class has discarded the mask of liberal democracy and is calling on U.S. imperialism to install fascist discipline and protect the local bosses’ riches—and their despicable lives.

Local bosses back gangs
When the state lacks legitimacy, organized crime becomes a dominant political force. Gangs are essentially capitalists without state power or the “rule of law” that regulates the bosses’ vicious competition. Haiti’s power vacuum is being filled by former cop Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier’s gang “G9 Family and Allies,” which controls access to the essential Varreux fuel terminal. For a country that runs on diesel generators, a blockade of the main fuel port means that schools and hospitals cannot function (The Daily Podcast, 12/8/22).

The G9 Alliance uses murder and sexist violence against women workers as systemic tools of terror (New York Post, 10/15/22). The gang is demanding amnesty, cabinet seats, and Henry’s resignation.  They are “financed by Haiti’s tiny clique of import-export oligarchs” (Foreign Policy, 10/31/22), which is nothing new. Working hand in hand with French and U.S. imperialists, these local bosses have played a critical role in Haiti’s impoverishment over the past two centuries. What may appear to be anarchy among rival gangs is in reality an internal fight among bosses against a backdrop of a divided and weakening U.S. ruling class.

U.S. impotence
Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the U.S. has treated the Caribbean and Latin America as its “backyard.” But with the relative decline of U.S. imperialism, China’s capitalist bosses have made inroads in the region, investing over $10 billion in Caribbean countries since 2005.

The U.S. bosses’ weakness is exposed by their inability to respond by rallying its allies and its own military leaders into putting boots on the ground in Haiti. “The U.S. doesn’t want its own troops included” in the multinational force (New York Times, 11/29/22). It hasn’t been able to persuade Mexico, Brazil, Canada, or France to lead the assault. At this point, U.S. imperialists are uncertain if they can pull off an Afghanistan-style invasion.

One sure thing to come is an exodus of more refugees from Haiti to the U.S., where the state-sanctioned thugs of the U.S. Border Patrol will greet them with more racist terror, just as they did in June. Biden expanded temporary protected status for 110,000 workers from Haiti to stay for 18 months—a drop in the bucket for people who have lost everything to the instability and callousness of the profit system. It’s up to our class to welcome and organize refugees of capitalism.

Humanitarianism = imperialism
Beginning in 1791, enslaved Black workers in Haiti led the first successful revolution to abolish slavery, striking fear in the hearts of rulers around the world. Imperialists have been bleeding workers in Haiti ever since. Imperialist extortion of Haiti by the U.S. and France explains why Haiti suffers the worst poverty and inequality in the Western Hemisphere.

History shows us there is no such thing as "humanitarian intervention" in an imperialist system. The U.S., its allies, and the UN have been invading Haiti for more than 200 years, causing ever greater super-exploitation, impoverishment, and instability for workers (see box). The working class in Haiti is rightly feared by the bosses. The politicians and the gang leaders know that once they’re forced to remove their boots from the neck of the working class, their days will be numbered.

Workers have no borders
Progressive Labor Party must fight to turn this hellhole into a hotbed of revolutionary communist fightback To eliminate gangsters on the street and in the halls of government, we need communism.

Organize across borders! An attack on one is an attack on all. We must build international working-class solidarity through our mass organizations. Borders were created by the capitalists to define which workers were theirs to exploit. Working people have no nation!

“I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers…I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.”
— U.S. Maj. General Smedley Butler

The current crisis in Haiti is the consequence of more than 200 years of gangsterism by the U.S. and other capitalist powers.

• 1915-1934: Following the assassination of President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the U.S. invaded and seized control over Haitian finances in the name of “stability” for U.S. interests (Foreign Affairs, 12/1/22). Then it violently suppressed uprisings against the U.S. occupation.
• 1994: After decades of U.S. money, weapons, and troops to support the brutal, anti-communist Duvalier gang—which massacred as many as 60,000 people —President Bill Clinton sent 20,000 troops to Haiti under “Operation Uphold Democracy.”
• 2004:Partnering with France, Canada, and Chile, the U.S. invaded Haiti to escort President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out after the CIA orchestrated a coup to oust him (Guardian, 3/13/22). The troops remained until they were replaced by the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which became infamous for mass rape (Al Jazeera, 10/6/22). This 13-year occupation also brought a siege of cholera that killed 10,000 people and sickened more than 850,000 (AP News, 10/18/22).

THIS is what the capitalist bosses mean by “order” and “stability.” The working class in Haiti has fought back at every step. They fought enslavers, imperialists, super-exploitative industry bosses, the cholera-spreading MINUSTAH, and the Tonton Macoute death squads. Haiti is a harbinger of the rulers’ decay, an example of what’s to come as the worldwide crisis of capitalism deepens and intensifies. There are no certainties in this world, except one: Our class will continue to fight.

Baltimore, Maryland, November 30—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined about 40 students, faculty and community supporters to protest Johns Hopkins University’s plan for a $10 million private, armed police force. The day’s activities included a two-hour march through the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University (JHU), an evening vigil, and then a West Wednesday rally outside City Hall. During the campus march, a PLP member distributed 20 flyers and copies of CHALLENGE, and engaged in conversations about socialism, communism and the history of racist police murder in Baltimore.  Racism is a pillar of capitalist society and that includes universities. Over policing and murder by kkkops are glaring examples of racist attacks on all workers and students, Black and white. The whole capitalist system has to go.

That night’s West Wednesday rally condemned the recent police killing of Tyree Moorehead, the main creator of Baltimore’s “no shoot zones.” Some maintain that Mr. Moorehead was threatening a woman’s life with a knife, but the police shot him 14 times, continuing to shoot even after Mr. Moorehead, lying on the street, had rolled a distance away from the woman. This is yet another case of the police acting as judge, jury and executioner.

School kkkops enforce campus fascism
At the evening vigil, a member of PLP explained that armed campus police forces, starting at private universities in the 60s, were not created to protect the safety of students or neighboring community members, which Hopkins officials claim to be their goal. No, explained the speaker, the real reason was to enable universities to suppress powerful on-campus protests supporting civil rights, and opposing the imperialist war in Vietnam.

When Hopkins started their propaganda campaign, seeking to win Maryland State approval for an armed campus police force, Hopkins Students Against Private Police researched University statistics. Hopkins already had about 1,000 unarmed security guards. It turns out, for the year researched by the students, regarding “suspects” detained by campus security, 97 percent were Black, even though the student body includes only a small percentage of Black students. Hopkins has orchestrated this racial profiling, and now wants to put guns into the mix. Two students explained that, while the university claims to uphold “democracy,” it has consistently refused to listen to the majority of students, faculty and community who oppose an armed campus force.

History of students’ antiracist fightback
The struggle at Hopkins is not new. In 2018, militant rallies, a month-long take-over of the administration building, community petitions with thousands of names, and community groups - including West Wednesday – all strongly opposed the establishment of an armed force. Nevertheless, in 2019 Hopkins succeeded in getting the Maryland General Assembly to pass legislation allowing the university, medical complex, and Peabody Institute to move forward with a private, armed police force.
However, after the horrific death of George Floyd and the millions of people who stood strong against that racist police murder, Hopkins announced it would delay implementation of the armed force for two years. Now the time is up, and JHU – figuring the sit-in students and their supporters have largely graduated and gone – is moving forward again.

Still, anti-racist protestors disrupted hearings about this issue in September. Ongoing rallies, by students and community members, have demonstrated deep feelings against violent policing and the danger it poses, especially to Black and Latin students, and to nearby community residents.

Today’s rally and vigil started with a walkout at Gilman Hall. Speakers at checkpoints included a faculty member who recounted past attacks on student protests by the administration and campus security. Several students said they have been protesting for years against Hopkins’ plans for an armed force.

Can’t reform away police terror
Another parallel development is that the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) will soon be overseen by the Baltimore City government. Until now, for over a hundred years, it has been the State of Maryland that oversaw BPD. Some organizers see this as a reform that will lead to significant police accountability.

As communists, we understand that police brutality will continue under this system, no matter which level of government is in charge. This is because police terror is essential to capitalism, just as brutal slave catchers were essential to the institution of slavery. We will continue to fight against racist police murder, from Freddie Gray and Tyrone West, to the recent murder – by a security guard – of Kevin Torres in Baltimore. And we will continue to share our understanding of the need for multiracial unity, revolution, and the creation of a new egalitarian world with real sisterhood and brotherhood.