Nazis Out of Boston! Power to the workers!
Right here in liberal Massachusetts the racist Small Fascist (see glossary) movement, fronted by Trump and engineered by billionaire domestic capitalists like Charles Koch and Kelcy Lee Warren, is trying to gain a toehold of strength. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in New England are priming ourselves to join with other antiracists to crush them in the cradle. Though this racist movement, sprouting in New England, is an immediate threat we must not lose sight of the great danger that Big Fascist liberals pose for the working class.
Make no mistake, Small Fascists are small fry compared to the Big Fascists, the politically liberal, finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. The Big Fascists pose the greatest danger. From arming Saudi and Israeli terror bosses carrying out nonstop lethal bombing campaigns, to arming Ukranian Nazi battalions, the Big Fascists are the main sponsors of global imperialist terror. Their crumbling empire and decaying liberal order make them especially dangerous for the international working class in this period.
In late January, claiming “white genocide” a neo-Nazi organization, the Nationalist Social Club, (NSC) gathered at Brigham and Women’s Hospital protesting the cardiologists' decision to deny a heart transplant to a white man who refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine. This fascist group also passed out a flier attacking two antiracist doctors who have been fighting systemic racist practices regarding cardiology patients at the hospital. Specifically, the antiracist doctors are trying to correct the pattern of Black cardiac patients typically being admitted to general medicine while white cardiac patients are admitted to the cardiology service which usually results in better care and better outcomes.
Another anti-vaxxer group was also protesting the decision to deny a cardiac patient a heart transplant claiming that it is discriminatory to those who refuse the vaccine. Both groups are using hot-button issues of racism and vaccine mandates to divide the working class and prop up their racist Small Fascist movement.
PLP distributed CHALLENGE and passed out a leaflet calling workers to smash these nazis and to support the fight against racist medical practices. We got a positive response from hundreds of hospital workers as they streamed in and out of the hospital. Many stopped to talk to us while we leafletted and distributed copies of CHALLENGE.
The NSC has made other bold appearances in New England. They tried to shut down the reading of The Communist Manifesto at a library in Providence, Rhode Island, and appeared at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston. The anti-vaxxers disrupted a Boston Teachers Union conference, protesting the union’s position on the vaccine.
Nurses and teachers later spoke out against their reported racist and insulting verbiage against educators. Their actions and the union's response prompted important discussions about racism in the schools. The fascists also protested the mask mandates inside a Boston Public Library Children's Reading Room and vandalized a bust of Maya Angelou. The Boston Public Librarians union held a rally protesting this, which we attended and distributed our literature.
All over the U.S. and now in Boston, the Small Fascist movement has been building local electoral and other campaigns to mobilize for white nationalism, racism, and anti-communism, appealing to the racist fears of white workers being crushed by the declining standard of living.
PLP in New England has vowed to confront the white supremacists and fascists whenever they raise their ugly heads as we continue to organize opposition to ongoing racist practices in the hospitals and schools where we work.
At the same time, we must not forget that the Big Fascist liberals, who still dominate the U.S. politically and economically, are doing everything in their power to drain the revolutionary potential of antiracist class conscious movements, co-opting and injecting them with their toxic identity and electoral politics. Big Fascist politicians such as New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot dupe Black, Latin and Asian workers into falling in line with the oppressors they can identify with. Big Fascist movements threaten to win workers to multicultural U.S. nationalism, and its deadly logic of sacrificing workers for the survival of U.S. imperialism.
So, while we fight the Small Fascists in Massachusetts, PLP is especially committed to ideologically defeating Big Fascist misleaders in the unions, nonprofits, and schools as well as defeating Big Fascist representatives in liberal cities.Thus, PLP believes that to truly snuff out the fascist threat we must organize workers around the world to smash all fascists both big and small.
*****
Students connect Alabama to Amazon
We are college professors who teach at the City University of New York (CUNY) and have been active in building rank and file strike committees on our respective campuses. Last month we held a successful student forum with over 30 students to discuss the historic strikes at CUNY and the need to continue building this movement on our campuses. A few days after the victory at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island we held a “brown bag lunch” on zoom to discuss how we can build the worker-student alliance at CUNY.
This informal discussion was exciting and timely as we heard from workers who had recently led some job actions at Amazon warehouses, a student and professor who traveled to Alabama this winter as part of a solidarity trip supporting the miners’ strike, and a labor historian. The Amazon workers were bold and inspiring as they described how they shut down the warehouse they work at. The CUNY folks who traveled to Alabama shared their stories of fight back and inspiration, walking the picket lines with Black and white coal miners as well as helping out with Christmas festivities. Our friend who is a labor historian pointed out that one lesson of the Amazon strike is the need to build fightback from “the bottom up” and not to rely on politicians or union “leaders” to organize for us. He also made the point that while we work for wages under capitalism, ultimately there is a better way to organize society, based on the collective needs of the working class and not profit.
We will continue to find ways to build the worker student alliance at CUNY!