Tanzania: Anti-Albino Racism Hurts All Workers

Tanzania is home to the genocide of workers who have a condition known as albinism. The genocide occurs mainly in the city of Mwanza and in the mining regions of Geita, Kagera, and Shinyanga. The Progressive Labor Party in Tanzania is the only group connecting this genocide to capitalism, and we fight for a communist world where it will be abolished!
Albinism is an inherited, genetic skin condition caused by a mutation affecting the enzyme in human skin responsible for skin, hair, and eye color.  It’s believed that albino workers were persecuted in many other places and fled to Tanzania, which may explain why Tanzania has the greatest concentration of albino people in the world.  Tanzania is a former British colony, and the British encouraged beliefs that albino workers were cursed. These racist superstitions led many albino infants to be thrown away in the forests.

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Capitalist Crisis Caused by Overproduction

It’s inspiring to read that high school students are leading classes in political economy (“Spring Communist School: Youth Take Lead Building for Revolution,” CHALLENGE, 4/22). However, we need to correct a mistake in one part of the article that says that capitalist crises, also known as depressions or recessions, occur because workers can’t “buy back” what they produce. Depressions and recessions are actually periodic “crises of overproduction,” meaning too much of something is produced for capitalists to make a profit.
The most recent recession, in 2007-2008, began with overproduction of houses. In spite of mass homelessness and a general housing shortage for workers, like everything produced under capitalism, profitability isn’t related to how many workers are able to buy homes. Capitalists can only realize profits when competing groups of capitalists sell more homes and expand their share of the market.

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Birth of New Communist Movement — PL Sparks Class War

Since May 6, we have been publishing articles in celebration of PLP’s 50th anniversary. These articles describe the origins of PLP — including its forerunner, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — as well as our concentration among industrial workers and why the fight against racism is of strategic importance in the fight to overthrow capitalism. Here we will review our Party’s leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the breaking of the government ban on travel to Cuba, and the defeat of the fascist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
PLM Leads the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In the early 1960s, class struggle was heating up. The U.S. bosses embarked on a genocidal war in Vietnam. The leadership shown by the working class in Vietnam after decades of resistance to French imperialism inspired millions of workers worldwide. Black workers led rebellions in almost every major U.S. city and rocked the capitalist class back on its heels. In the midst of intensifying class struggle in March 1964, a Yale University conference on socialism was attended by many pseudo-left organizations, including the “Communist” Party USA and various Trotskyite groups. The conference was geared for a scholarly debate on theory. Only PLM broke through this nonsense to advocate building a militant anti-imperialist movement!

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U.S. Bosses Face Russian Roulette

When the leaders speak of peace
The common folk know
That war is coming.
When the leaders curse war
The mobilization order is already written out.
-Bertolt Brecht, A German War Primer

Around the planet, the potential for global war among imperialists is escalating—and with it the threat of devastation for the international working class. At the moment, the Russian rulers loom as the U.S. bosses’ sharpest rivals. As Russia pursues an undeclared war with NATO ally Ukraine and moving nuclear-capable weapons near NATO borders, the Pentagon prepares to mobilize heavy weaponry and up to 5,000 troops in the Baltic states and former Eastern Bloc. Tensions between the two imperialist powers are higher than at any time since the Cold War. Seeking both battlefield superiority and game-changing alliances, they seem to be on a collision course.

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RACISM EXPELS WORKERS FROM DR

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The hot-button subject in the Dominican Republican is the racist “hunt for Haitians.” The current attack, reminiscent of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre” of up to 50,000 Haitian sugar cane workers, has led to the deportation of 40,000 people to Haiti in the first quarter of 2015 alone (Guardian, 6/16/15). As workers are expelled or flee in terror, they move from capitalist oppression in the DR to what is often an even worse plight in Haiti. They are the living proof that national borders serve only the capitalist ruling class.
PLP, our international communist party, has joined anti-racist struggles in support of our Haitian sisters and brothers, both here and the U.S. In Brooklyn, PLP connected the racist deportations in DR to the racist deportations and killings of Black and Latin youth in the U.S. In Port-au-Prince, comrades held demonstrations and conferences attacking the racist bosses on both sides of the island of Hispaniola.

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On the Job, In the Streets Smash Bosses’ Terror

PAKISTAN, July 15 — Pakistan is moving along a bloody path established by the capitalist bosses for their long- and short-term interests. The bosses need fear, chaos and unrest in the country to keep the working class silent on their exploitation and poverty. The bosses pit workers against each other by using nationalism, fundamentalism, sexism, racism and the false concept of ethnicity. Women workers are super-exploited, earning little or no pay and often working under subhuman conditions. All of these divisions are an attempt to circumvent our unity. PLP is fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses.

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Students, Workers Target Wage-Slave Traders

TEL AVIV, July 10 — Workers here are waging a fight against contract work and demanding direct employment, a boss-worker relationship without an intermediary agency that pay substandard wages. PLP’s involvement in this reform struggle can help win workers to communist politics.
A group of contract workers and fighters of the National Coalition for Direct Employment walked through downtown Tel Aviv, marking the pavement with chalk in front of businesses and government offices that employ contract workers. Several PL’ers, one of whom is active in the Coalition, took part in the activity.
On June 18, we also rode the train from Be’er Sheva to Haifa and back, talking with passengers and showing videos about the contract workers’ plight. The response was enthusiastic. Most passengers were strongly opposed to the capitalist practice of contract employment. Most fighters in the Coalition were social work students and their teachers. Instead of merely discussing the horrors of capitalism inside class, they came out to the streets to challenge this exploitation.

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Working Class Rejects Bosses War Plans

Tokyo, Japan, July 13 — Thousands are rallying here every week to protest ruling-class plans to expand the country’s military.
Led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan’s leading bosses hope to intensify nationalism and its military powers. China and North Korea’s rulers have recently tested the waters long dominated by the U.S. military with island building and military tests. Japan’s bosses are using fear about these growing confrontations to revise Japan’s constitution and long-held position as a “pacifist” country with a tiny military (“defense force”).
Since World War II, Japan has been home to many military bases for the U.S., and provided funding for their imperialist efforts. But workers in Japan are refusing to accept the local bosses’ war plans. Young and old, women and men, rain or shine, they are in the streets saying no to Abe & Co’s plans.
Many of the youth at the rallies connected the growth of war with racism and fascism. Some working-class women took leadership at these marches by giving speeches and distributing fliers.
There needs to be millions of workers in the streets, on strike and refusing orders in the barracks. And even then, capitalism’s relentless drive for profits will lead to war. That’s why from Japan to Iraq, this whole system must be smashed.

Haiti: Century of Resistance to U.S. Imperialism

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. bosses’ first occupation of Haiti. The Haitian rulers and their international masters are celebrating a century of imperialist plunder with a CARIFESTA, a Caribbean Festival of Arts. But Haitian workers and students are fed up! U.S. imperialism has created the recurrent crises that have plagued the Haitian working class since 1915, including the current wave of racist expulsions of workers of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic (see front page).
Which leads to some questions: How do the imperialists maintain their domination? And, most important: Is a communist-led working class ready to abolish this brutal exploitation?

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Black-White Unity Cripples Warmakers

Multi-racial unity slams scabs in 1967 strike shutting the world’s largest shipbuilder in Newport News, Virginia. Ignited by a wildcat walkout led by over 200 Black workers in the key transportation department, it was joined by 14,000 Black and white workers who defied the bosses’ “national interest” by refusing to service U.S. Navy aircraft carriers during the Vietnam War. Said one police official, “They attacked us like they were brothers.” The working class needs the same multiracial solidarity today.