Oakland March: New Reds Politicize Crowd

OAKLAND, January 21—Progressive Labor Party and friends energized a passive crowd at the National Women’s March with our militant anti-capitalist chants and speeches. The turnout was 60,000 people marching without speeches or chants. We decided we had to turn it up. We chanted, “Hey Trump, you fascist, we’ll burn your house to ashes.”
While some appeared confused and apprehensive to join us, many joined in and asked for multiple copies of our 800 leaflets and copies of CHALLENGE. It is out job as communists to expose the whole system, not just trump.
Learning in the Streets
Our PLP contingent was a visual representation of worker unity across gender, race, and age. Two young women gave political leadership for the first time. Part of their apprehension to lead stemmed from the passive tone of the march. There were no apparent political demands or calls to action. When we tried to lead chants at first, only a few joined in. Some seemed upset that we were saying anything political because they said, “We were asked not to do that.”
The other PL comrades pushed the younger women to lead with confidence. What began as hesitation gave way to leading dozens of people with speeches and chants. When one young woman gave a speech that profits are the problem, and sexist and racist divisions only hurt us, many people cheered in agreement!
Friends helped distribute hundreds of CHALLENGEs and leaflets and lead discussions about police murders in the Bay Area. The antiracist, antisexist militancy of our communist contingent had a visible impact on the engagement and morale of the workers around us.
Democrats, Republics All the Same
It was clear the march brought out many for whom it was their first time in the streets, and who were devastated that Barack Obama would no longer be their Bomber-in-Chief. That’s why it’s important that PLP was struggling with people to understand that Obama and the Democrats have never been friends of the working class, and that the only way to defeat global fascism is by smashing capitalism.
While workers taking to the streets en masse for the first time provides the possibility for us to push their politics further to the left, it does not necessarily mean that this movement will spontaneously lead to workers fighting to smash capitalism. It is vital that PLP continues to build a Party and movement to take power and build the communist world that all workers deserve.
Marching in the streets demanding reproductive rights is important, but these demands are limited and will continue to lead us to the hamster wheel of reform unless we are building a worker led Progressive Labor Party to fight for state power.
Women & Men, Unite!
Capitalism needs sexism to divide and blind workers from the reality that we are all being exploited and oppressed by the same ruling class. The role of identity politics has been to exacerbate these divisions and to perpetuate the suppression of class-consciousness by making identity primary.
During the march a woman told a comrade, “The male race as always looked out for itself, so the female race needs to do the same and stick together.” Aside from historical and logical error in that statement, a fight that shuns half of our force is one we are guaranteed to lose. When we view ourselves as inherently different or opposed to an entire group of workers, we are doing the bosses’ work. Many of our friends were able to see how conflicting these politics were to our fight for a worker-led society.
As we continue to navigate our way through this dark night, the work of the Progressive Labor Party is essential to building worker’s confidence in their class brothers and sisters.