Haiti: Student Strike Supporters Champion Communist Internationalism

“Everything we do now counts.”  Revolutionaries in the international PLP often say this. We mean that you have to see every act of organizing workers, right now, as one step in the communist movement we are rebuilding one step at a time.  You have to hang on to that belief, especially now, when the working class often loses everyday reform battles, the strikes and protests which CHALLENGE covers. We need a mass communist party which can unify all our struggles, redouble our strength, and raise the idea of taking back from our exploiters all the value which we create as workers and which they steal from us in the form of profits. 
The student support letter from Haiti for the NYC school bus strike (CHALLENGE, 2/27) raised that idea as an international goal, saying workers “from everywhere must unite to fight together under the red flag.”  Their message of support counts because it lifts the strikers’ eyes from a local struggle which they may not win to their broader power, as one international class, to change the game entirely. This generation of radical students in Haiti has fought and lost many battles (and won a few), but they refuse to despair.
As they graduate and become workers themselves, they will keep fighting, many of them, because they have the hope that a unified, international, communist-led working class can win the world.  That is why they wrote this letter.  For them, and for us all, it counts because it represents one small example of that revolutionary hope and resolve which an international communist movement can bring to workers who may often lose their local battles.
In Haiti despair is precisely what the bosses hope to create (read any media story on Haiti). But unionized teachers and bus drivers and conductors, who have themselves led many bitter struggles with little immediate gain (see teachers’ strike stories in CHALLENGE issues of November and December), also wrote letters of support to the ATU Local 1181 strikers.  They don’t have the revolutionary fire of the student letter, but they ring true as messages between workers in struggle from different countries. They count as refusals to accept defeat. They rise above local despair to find hope in our potential power as an international class. 
The laid-off bus drivers of Port-au-Prince, for example, call in their letter for “respect for the agreements ratified by all the unionized countries of the world — as well as for respect of our human rights as workers.”  This is respect they totally find lacking themselves in Haiti! They were all fired five years ago for striking (like the air traffic controllers under Reagan), even though that is illegal under Haitian labor law.
They have not won their jobs back to this day, and unemployment in Haiti is a life sentence. Yet they still keep alive the idea of internationalism, albeit in liberal form. They still see the point of calling for respect of workers as an international human right. They point to agreements that have been won by workers’ union strength internationally — even though they themselves are proof that under the bosses’ dictatorship such liberal labor laws and treaties, and human rights talk in general, are often not worth the paper they’re printed on!
Also, the bus drivers’ letter thanks workers from the U.S., including transport workers, “who have always brought their support to us through the different problems we have encountered in Haiti.” Obviously this is not true of the sellout international transport union leaders!  But these workers in Haiti have seen such support first-hand from rank-and-file unionists over several years, and they know it counts. They respond by writing  to the NYC strikers because they know that counts too. These are small steps to proletarian internationalism, but they count. 
To the multinational workers of Local 1181 (not a few from Haiti), a letter like this must be recognizable as a letter from a brother and a sister.  It must make them feel they do have that bond as workers — in the same industry, in this case — although the bosses’ frontiers try to separate them. It’s the job of revolutionaries to transform that bond into communist comradeship.
The teachers’ letter to Local 1181 strikers sounds the same internationalist note:
The struggle for job security, attacked more and more by bosses and governments during this capitalist crisis, is one we have in common.  It deserves the highest international solidarity.  That’s why from Haiti we strongly support this strike.
This message too doesn’t wave the red flag, but is it far from doing so? It shows that each group of strikers, in whatever country, faces a common enemy, the capitalist system, with its constant crises and its bond between bosses and the state. It calls for international solidarity in a common class struggle against a common class enemy.
This too must ring true to the strikers in New York; they know workers everywhere (in their first countries, for example) have the same problems, though “in different degrees,” as the student letter put it.  It’s the job of PL’ers to raise that truth to a higher level and recruit strikers in New York and teachers and transport workers in Haiti to the Party.
Out of these temporary, but real and cruel, defeats in the class struggles of today can come victory. Each struggle strengthens our forces for the next struggle and especially our efforts to create that mass PLP we need for victory in “the final struggle” which the red anthem the “Internationale” sings of.
These letters from Haiti should inspire us. The key to the bosses’ victories at present is that they hold state power.  So everything that weakens their grip on that, and strengthens our forces, counts; everything — the smallest thing — we do right now to build a PLP capable of seizing that power from them counts. The letters from our comrades and friends in Haiti are a living example.