Letters of March 30

From Rome to Russia: Bella Ciao
We are two members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) currently living in Rome, Italy.  The crisis in Ukraine (see editorial on page 2) has sparked many protests. The U.S. and European news media want workers to think that everyone in the so-called West is on board with NATO, U.S. imperialism, and Ukrainian nationalism. But across all the banners of the 50,000 demonstrators at the March 6 protest, we only saw two Ukrainian flags.
At the rally no one was buying into the position that Uncle Sam and the European bosses were the good guys, charging-in to save “democracy.” The loudest and most frequent chants called for an end to the war and for Italy to get out of NATO. The spirit of proletarian internationalism reverberated throughout much of the crowd.
As PLP members, we want to connect with some of the leftist groups present at the demonstration. Our goal is to see if we can find common ground for revolutionary, communist theory and practice. There are many workers around the world who are sick and tired of being sick and tired of racism, capitalism, sexism, and imperialism.  We need to find our like-minded comrades in other regions and countries, discuss our points of agreement and difference, and find ways to organize for the communist future urgently needed by the workers of the world.
Red mama raising little Red
I’ve been a stay-at-home mama for the past two years. Though there are struggles, as with anything else, it has truly been a rewarding and life-changing experience for me. I feel lucky to witness my little one’s (LO) development and to spend time getting to know this little human.
My LO is speaking a lot for their age and loves to sing. Music is an important part of our daily rituals; it’s a great source of joy and a wonderful tool for teaching language.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been practicing songs for a recording with a comrade. My LO has caught on and has been requesting to sing songs with lyrics such as, “We are the mighty working class,” “All that it takes for evil to win is for good people to do nothing,” and “Workers always save the day!” While I know that my LO does not fully understand all that they are saying, I’m happy that they are adding phrases like “working class” to their growing vocabulary. These early impressions on a child’s life are significant!
We attended an anti-imperialism/anti-war protest a few weeks ago regarding Ukraine. Days later, my LO and I were chanting: Me: “Racism means”… LO: “We got to fight back!”
It may seem small, but I’m reminded that everything we do counts! Our children are watching us. As the comrade says in the song, The Mighty, “when you feel the most like hiding, we should know how much is riding on what each of us do!”
Here’s to hopes of raising a future working class leader and fighter!
*****
Struggle continues in this game, set, match
So I play tennis with a very nice guy who happens to be Russian but he grew up in Kiev, Ukraine. As I got to know him, I realized that he was a liberal guy who hated Trump and Putin both. But he also made derogatory comments about Stalin and about the former Soviet Union.
When the war in Ukraine started he was very much against Putin but I decided to push back a little and criticize the role of U.S. imperialism and the role of NATO. He would have none of that. It was all Putin’s fault. I mentioned that in between the two wars that the U.S. launched against Iraq, President Bill Clinton’s administration enforced a no fly zone over a large part of Iraq. They bombed Iraqi jets and installations. According to a United Nations (UN) report,I explained, 500,000 women and children were killed by this U.S. bombing. He would have none of this. No way, he said. It did not happen. The U.S. did not do any such thing and anyway, both wars in Iraq were carried out by the two Bush presidents. Clinton had nothing to do with either war.
We argued for a bit and then I said, “Google it.” I didn’t think he would but I made sure that I did. I wanted to bring him the proof. Lo and behold, the proof was not so easy to find. And as far as the New York Times was concerned, the bombing never happened. I had to do several different Google searches and look way past the first four to five pages and even then the so-called legitimate sources like the New York Times had very little. But it turns out I was also somewhat wrong. UNICEF (UN agency) said it was a combination of U.S. bombing and also sanctions, and the number of deaths they listed was one million children. I’m thinking to myself, what a great job of censorship is done by the liberal Big Fascist (see Glossary, page 6) media. How hypocritical of them to accuse the Russian and Chinese fascists of censorship.
When we next spoke my friend had indeed Googled the Iraq wars and came up with entirely different information, mainly relating to deaths of Iraqi soldiers.
 I explained to him my struggle with liberal U.S. censorship. He was not convinced. So we bet a bottle of wine about who was right, but he insisted that I had to find proof for my argument in the New York Times. The struggle continues.
*****
50 years later racism rotten as ever
This past month marked 50 years since, as a young member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Friends of Progressive Labor Party, I and some comrades in Iowa organized to confront a racist professor. Richard Herrnstein (who later wrote The Bell Curve with Charles Murray) was coming to the University of Iowa to speak. SDS had been kicked off campus the year before for sitting in to stop the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) from recruiting students during the height of the war in Vietnam.
Over 500 people came to “discuss” with Herrnstein his theories about IQ (intelligence quotient). His position was that higher IQ people are on the top of the heap in the capitalist system. He said they deserve to be there because the U.S. is a “meritocracy.” IQ is NOT genetically based as Herrnstein (and other pseudoscientists) would have us believe. More money, family connections, and better schools are what counts in this system. IQ is socially determined. Herrnstein attempted to justify the racist capitalist system based on the pseudoscience of IQ and its use. Most people who came that day were having none of it. Herrnstein never showed up to give his talk. Comrades from Chicago came and took over the stage to make it a forum about fighting racism under capitalism.
Looking back, I was kicked out of the university, but have no regrets. It was an important struggle that continues 50 years later in other forms. Under capitalism, if any progress against racism is made, it is taken away later. Such is the case now with the level of racism at a high, moving closer to Jim Crow levels. Since then, we have had some success in smashing the nazis in the 70s and 80s. We have stood up against racist police murders. But, like whack-a-mole, this system keeps popping back up.
We have a new generation of comrades that are leading the struggle to smash the bosses once and for all. My hope is that learning from past revolutions and our own experiences in struggle over the last several decades will help direct us toward an egalitarian communist society in which racism is a crime.
*****
The deadly hypocrisy of NATO
Millions worldwide can see through U.S. imperialism and NATO’s hypocrisy in their cynical opposition to Russian imperialism’s invasion of the Ukraine. What is less front and center is the state of life for the working class in Afghanistan.  Since the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces life there has been one of starvation.
A devastating 20-year, racist “war on terror” has produced a situation so dire that the United Nations has declared that the Afghani people are set to “plunge into universal poverty” with 97 percent of its population of nearly 40 million falling below the global poverty line (The New Yorker, 1/05). According to UNICEF, more than 23 million Afghanis suffer from acute hunger (ABC News, 2/09), with one million children at risk of dying from starvation (New York Times, 9/13/21). It has become so desperate that many Afghanis have been left to sell their organs for food (New York Times, 2/06). A mother of three, Aziza, told reporters at Al Jazeera that in the face of hunger “If I don’t sell my kidney, I will be forced to sell my one-year-old daughter,” so she is choosing her kidney (Al Jazerra, 2/28).
NATO’s imperialist alliance brought brutal conditions to Afghanistan. After catastrophically handing power over to the right-wing Taliban, these same Western powers have economically embargoed the starving Afghani people (New York Times, 2/20). In fact, imperialist-in-chief, Joe Biden, is planning on looting 3.5 billion dollars from the frozen funds of Afghanistan’s central bank during this humanitarian disaster (New York Times, 2/13).
 While the U.S.-led fascists demand a new cold war to counter Russia’s imperialist war in Ukraine, they continue to orchestrate a campaign of brutal silence as millions of our class brothers and sisters perish at their hands in Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and Afghanistan. The working-class must refuse nationalism and imperialism. Only an organized working-class lead by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party can seize state power to end imperialist genocide once and for all. To repeat Lenin, the international working-class must turn imperialist war into class war. Fight for communism, join PLP!
*****