HAITI, September 19 — Nearly a month after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, workers in the southwestern region are still struggling to rebuild their lives under super-exploited and vulnerable conditions. As the ruling class of Haiti has deserted these efforts, comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continue to fight back and stand in solidarity with their international working-class brothers and sisters. With a communist understanding that basic worker needs like shelter, food, and water should be available to all at no cost, our comrades are working hand-in-hand to salvage an infrastructure that was already in shambles pre-earthquake. This is communist solidarity not charity. Our work alongside our sisters and brothers in Haiti and the U.S. demonstrates that the working class is the only force capable of rebuilding and running society, and restoring our basic dignity. It is only through years of commitment, developing ties with workers, and organizing for a communist revolution that workers of the world will all live under equitable and humane conditions.
Unnatural disasters destroy
Almost every morning and evening, comrades, friends, and relatives of PLP members meet with fellow workers to survey the disaster and collaborate not only on immediate fixes, but also to discuss how the capitalist profit system is responsible for these miserable and offensive conditions.
What the rulers and their lackeys in the bourgeois press call “natural disasters,” like earthquakes, and floods, and storms, are really the products of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and furthermore the uneven distribution of wealth, goods, and basic needs, at the expense of our class.
The wreckage these “unnatural disasters” leave behind is a reflection of how disposable the ruling class treats working-class lives. An earthquake of a similar magnitude (7.2) in an imperialist country or a rich neighborhood would undoubtedly produce less damage and leave fewer dead. Under capitalism, we cannot divorce race and class, and thus in “underdeveloped” areas, it is racism and the profit motive that lead to higher rates of death and destruction. Under communism, an egalitarian system where workers’ needs are primary, from each according to ability, to each according to need, we would guarantee that until we can right the environmental wrongs that capitalism has caused, at minimum all workers will be taken care of.
Working-class solidarity across borders
When their houses were destroyed in the earthquake, workers were forced to seek shelter under small structures made of cardboard, used tin, straw and sometimes even rags. As workers wait for the arrival of government help that is slow to come, if at all, Party members continue to support as best we can under the strained circumstances and take leadership from workers on the ground who know the importance of helping one another.
We have sourced contributions from comrades and those close to our Party in the United States, Canada, and Haiti. We distributed clothing to children, youth, and adults. Two comrades collected boxes of clothes donated by relatives in Port-au-Prince. They also purchased more clothing with funds they collected. These clothes, especially those distributed to children, are in new condition. It’s through these seemingly small, yet significant acts that workers are reassured through theory and practice that PLP and their comrades are there for them.
With the donations collected from inside and outside Haiti, we have been able to buy and distribute roofing materials and nails to cover the shelters. We’ve also distributed aid via coupons for people to use in stores. With each coupon people can get two to four sheets of metal and one to two pounds of nails.
Where we can, we provide support to workers of all ages. A childless neighbor in her eighties, whose arm was broken during the earthquake, was relocated to a small house built with new metal sheeting and we make sure to visit her on a regular basis. We are also providing support to an 8-year-old boy whose two knees were severely damaged. We are making arrangements for him to go to school and will cover his school expenses to relieve the family of the financial burden.
One of our comrades, originally from a nearby area also badly hit by the earthquake, returned to help out with both disaster relief and some political understanding of how capitalism created the conditions that allowed an earthquake to be so devastating.
In his small landlocked area devoid of social services, the state is almost completely absent and the working class, barely in survival mode before August 14, is in need of political leadership and organization. Even the presence of imperialist-backed NGOs (non-governmental organizations) is weak. Mistrust of politicians is rampant. Through experience and conversations with the Party, people know that they will only be taken advantage of, and that these politicians are only looking to line their own pockets.
Under capitalism what is the worth of a dollar?
When our comrade returned to his rural family home not long after the earthquake, he said:
At first I felt a little embarrassed to give some money that we had collected to a few people. I thought it was not the priority. I preferred to believe that they needed materials, sheet metal and wood for the reconstruction of their houses. As I went along, I realized that I had been greatly mistaken because people did indeed need a little money, because the money hardly ever circulates around here.” He explained that “the inhabitants grow much of their own food, but still need cash to buy certain things to prepare their meals and other necessities.
Because of the extreme poverty, the farmers are forced to sell their produce at very low prices…They are extremely vulnerable, they need everything. So our solidarity is welcomed, in whatever form we can provide it.
The reception from our class brothers and sisters was so warm that the comrade declared: "I feel very useful because of us (the Party).” Here are some responses to the Party’s involvement:
“For 30-40 years we have never seen someone do such meaningful things in a selfless way towards us."
My children have seen that I have been sick for a long time; today you allow me to go to the hospital.
You [comrade] allow us to vary what we eat, we hardly have enough to eat every day.
Every little communist action counts
Workers in Haiti, just like workers all over the world, are in need of a system that won’t leave them for dead. Yes, this earthquake worsened the situation of misery created by capitalism, but the international working class has been fighting to break their chains long before this crisis and will continue to fight back until their wrists are free!
Only communist revolution can do that. Thus, we organize ourselves and each other to bring our communist solidarity in the short term, medium term and long term. PLP, alongside the international working class, is making plans for the future, to recruit and grow our influence. We strengthen the Party by building more confidence in the masses, them in us and we in them. We try to build class consciousness and educate our class, young and old, politically. The contradictions of the capitalist system must be brought to light.
Every little communist action counts. Our actions in this context and those we will take in the future aim to demonstrate that communism must smash capitalism and its atrocities of exploitation and extreme poverty, racism and sexism; and war for profit that is on the horizon. Fight for communism. Join PLP.

BROOKLYN, August 28—For the eighth time in nine years the families of Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray joined with neighbors, friends, community organizations and the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to offer a different kind of basketball tournament to the Black youth of East Flatbush—Hoops for Justice.   
Shantel and Kimani were killed by killer kkkops working out of the 67th precinct.  In the weeks and months after Shantel’s death in June of 2012, PLP members built a base with her family in the process of organizing street marches to the precinct.  When Kimani was killed in March of 2013, a significant youth rebellion ensued along the same stretch of Church Avenue where our demonstrations had taken place over the prior months.  Hoops for Justice emerged as an annual event to continue the struggle in memory of Shantel and Kimani.
A hallmark of this tournament and the whole fight by this group of families for justice for their loved ones has been to rely on the working class. This reliance on the working class has let all of us see the beginnings of a communist workers led society. A society that we are fighting to put in place by organizing for communist revolution.
A tournament that puts the working class first
A wet start to the day could not dampen the enthusiasm that dozens of young people brought to this now-familiar summer affair. Other tournaments proceeded this summer as if Covid-19 did  not exist, similar to how Mayor Bill de Blasio has opened the city’s schools. These money-making basketball operations showed a disregard for the health of working-class youth in much the same way that the de Blasio school reopening plan was meant to keep the profit-making NYC economy going. Not Hoops for Justice.
Our leadership committee for the tournament engaged in a sharp struggle over the nature of the coronavirus and the urgent need for vaccination. Loved ones of Shantel and Kimani brought a rock-solid determination that this year’s event must go on.
PLP guaranteed that a consistent message that testing and vaccination are a crucial piece of the back to school routine was delivered.
Serving the working class, not the politicians
The slogan of community over competition emerged from our committee meetings and became a refrain at this year’s tournament. As in past years the food provided, the referee stipends, and the music were all provided due to the independent fundraising and leadership of the working class. The families who lost their loved ones have been wooed and courted by local elected officials to join this or that opportunist operation.  
 The families led the largest Manhattan demonstration in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The “NO” from these women to the liberal political establishment has been steadfast.  Their sense of justice—that no other family ought to ever suffer what they have—can never be satisfied by any of these lying, self-serving, petty, conniving, hack Democratic Party politicians. Only communism can meet this standard of justice and our rededication this year to that fight was marked at a touching memorial in the last hour of the tournament.  Onward!

One hundred years ago, August to September 1921, the world witnessed the largest armed rebellion of workers in U.S. history since the Civil War: the Battle of Blair Mountain. It was a great example of multiracial unity between Black and white miners.
Ten thousand armed coal miners marched from Charleston, West Virginia, 70 miles south to Blair Mountain, Logan County, West Virginia, to destroy the unjust system that had taken their health, their homes, and many of their lives. During the battle, striking white workers, partly inspired by the new workers’ state, the Soviet Union, joined with Black and immigrant workers. While the immigrant workers were originally sent to break the strike. The multiracial miners foiled the bosses plans by organizing these workers and turning the strike into a worker’s army.
The U.S. bosses, determined to crush armed insurrection, deployed bombers armed with gas and bombs left over from World War I, some of which were captured by the workers’ army. The workers faced the U.S. army, 3,000 local deputies, police, gunmen and the State Militia.
This march was the miners' immediate reaction to the August 21, 1921, murder of two of their own by the coal bosses' hired gunmen on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. These killings had followed years of unionizing attempts and guerrilla warfare in the West Virginia coal fields the previous winter.
Within 72 hours, 7,000 armed miners assembled outside Charleston and told the State government that they were going to “open up” Logan County for unionization and “blow it away.” On August 24, the miners' multiracial army, white and Black, citizen and immigrant, began the 70-mile march to Logan.
As the miners made their way from town to town, their ranks swelled.” By the time they reached Blair Mountain, they were 10,000 strong. The miners were a “fully-trained, highly disciplined army ... All the officers were World War I veterans  ...
They taught the miners troop movements [and] flank formations. They formed squadrons.
The original...rednecks’
The white workers, indicating their pro-working class politics over the bosses’ racism, wore red bandanas around their necks, earning the insult “redneck” by the capitalist media (Appalachian Magazine, 5/23/16).
In the bosses’ attempts to rewrite history and erase multiracial unity , it was after Blair Mountain that the “redneck” term became, in dictionaries and media, obscured and synonymous with “cracker” (originally, a child of a convict) and “hillbilly” (originally, extremely poor, often interracial, whites living in the Appalachian mountains and outside the norms of southern society).
This multiracial workers' army were the original “rednecks.” Perhaps in the future we should refer to racists in the South the same way we describe them anywhere in the world, simply as “racists.”
Matewan
The events that led up to the outbreak of this strike and the battle are depicted in the 1987 film “Matewan.” The film shows the miners fighting the bosses’ goons from the Baldwin-Felts detective agency and killing some of them.
But the main strength of the film is its realistic depiction of the militant multi-racial unity of the miners.
The key political struggle Kenehan [union organizer]wages in the first part of the movie is the one against racism. He attacks the racism of some of the miners and calls for organizing the Black and Italian workers into the union. ‘Few Clothes’ John, leader of the Black miners, also has an anti-racist position. There is a great showdown at the mine entrance, under the guns of the company thugs, as the miners stand all together, Blacks, white, and Italian. They march and sign ‘Avanti Popolo’(CHALLENGE, 10/21/87).
The miners lose in the end, as they did in real life. They have no communist party to build for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses. In the film as in reality the bosses, the goons, and the courts defeat the miners in the end.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to be the heir of this legacy of multiracial unity. With the sharpening attacks on the international working class and growing threat of all out inter-imperialist wars looming, our understanding of history is more important than ever as workers from every part of the working class seek out answers that only a new international communist movement can provide.J
The quotes in this article are drawn from a video production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, entitled Even the Heavens Weep—The West Virginia Mine Wars.

Would the miners think we were crazy?
When we flew to Alabama to support striking coal miners at the Warrior Met Coal Company, I was unsure what to expect. In addition to virtually ignoring the strike, national media had spent years depicting "red-state America" as a hopeless bastion of reactionary bigotry. Would the miners welcome support from communist New Yorkers? Would they think we were crazy? Would they be angry?
The response was extraordinary—we were welcomed, and so was our message. (There were exceptions, but they merely proved the rule.) The miners, feeling isolated by the national media's conspiracy of silence, were gratified to have support from outsiders.
They spoke to us about the life-threatening hazards miners face daily, and management's total disregard for their well-being. One 24-year-old worker had lost feeling in two of his fingers due to job-related injuries. Once, when he'd come to his manager with a hurt hand, the manager had checked the inside of his glove for blood to make sure he was being truthful.
Facing death on the job has given these miners a tremendous bond. This is what made them receptive to our message—that the world should be run by, and for, workers. The power of solidarity has kept them alive on a daily basis, and empowered them to demand more from their bosses. (And the miners hadn't bought into the Trump narrative of immigrants stealing good jobs from Americans. They expressed sympathy for exploited immigrant workers.) Everywhere we went, we could see that revolutionary class consciousness was almost there.
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Hammer, Hoe, and Hum: Alabama’s workers still fighting capitalism
The recent CHALLENGE article discussing our Party’s work with miners in Alabama reminded me of how much workers in Alabama have had to and continue to endure in recent history. It often seems that in Alabama, workers have had to deal with the consequences of U.S. capitalism in more brutal ways than workers in other states.
Alabama has been in the news recently due to a failed bid to organize Amazon workers. And other news articles recently noted that more people in Alabama died than were born in 2020 due to the bosses’ lack of a response to the Covid-19 crisis. This is more bad news for a state that already deals with some of the highest poverty rates and lowest education rates in the country.
The articles about our comrades’ visit to show support to workers in Alabama coincided with our club’s reading of early chapters from Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley.
All of the recent Alabama news reminds me of a few key lessons:
HThe bosses focus on separating workers by race and class is rooted in their goal to eliminate the idea of workers coming together to do anything empowering. That’s why Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always and will continue to prioritize worker solidarity!
Beware of the Black bourgeoisie’s attempts to encourage Black workers not to unionize or stand together against the system. A Black capitalist is still a capitalist! In Hammer and Hoe, Kelley describes the way wealthier Black people and the NAACP sought to dampen union struggles in the early 1920’s and 30’s and instead, promoted supporting Black business as the solution to the workers’ problems. Sound familiar?
HThe U.S. has focused so intently on reducing the power of unions in an effort to reduce the power of workers and combat communism.
HThe working class’ experience dealing with capitalist abuse has the potential to create new leadership within the working class. Kelley references workers who became Alabama Communist Party  leaders like Angelo Herndon, Estelle Milner and Al Murphy - all who joined the Party due to their own experiences dealing with the racist system in the South and throughout the U.S.
While bad news about the situation for workers in Alabama abounds, communists have and will continue to be there to support workers as shown through the history discussed in Hammer and Hoe and in the Party’s more recent work supporting miners in Brookfield.
There are many more lessons to learn beyond the four described above, but the final point is the most important: it is up to us, Progressive Labor Party, to help make clear the abuses of capitalism and to show our base that we have been and will always be there to help workers create a better world for the international working class.
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