1940s Langston Hughes: Antiracist writer & communist

This is part one of a three-part series on Hughes.

Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and activists made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930’s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers. 

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Crush racist parasites that live off of homeless workers

NEW YORK CITY, February 12— Capitalism makes sure that exploitation and profiteering are ever present even as homelessness becomes just another business.
“Man, I feel like there’s some exploitation going on here. I feel it!”

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Mexico: capitalist healthcare fails workers

MEXICO, February 16—In December, intent on projecting an image of control over the health crisis, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), presented a vaccination plan for the country.
The first stage would consist of immunization of all healthcare workers, and the second, would pursue vaccination of 15 million older adults concluding in March. Until yesterday, only a little more than 700 thousand people have been vaccinated, which does not even cover all employees in the health sector (Expansion Politica, 2/10).

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Haiti: this is capitalist democracy in crisis

HAITI, February 14—The Haitian working class is once again facing a political and economic crisis, mired in widespread violence unleashed by an emboldened president. There were mass demonstrations over the last year demanding that President Jovenel Moïse step down on February 7, the end of his constitutional mandate, culminating in a nationwide general strike that shut everything down. But this was not enough to force Moïse out.

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KKKops out of schools!

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD, February 11—Six months of antiracist organizing have led the county’s Board of Education (BOE) chair to unilaterally cancel the meeting that would vote on whether or not to remove cops out of schools. The rebellions after the racist murder of George Floyd ignited a local campaign to get armed police out of our county schools Capitalism uses police as agents of social control in our neighborhoods, jobs, and schools, using their power to put our kids into a school-to-jail pipeline.
“COUNSELORS NOT COPS!” has been the rallying cry of antiracists here. Progressive Labor Party (PLP), in helping lead the fight against racist police brutality in the county since the 1970s, plays a significant role in this campaign.

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Germany: how fascism developed in a liberal democracy

Germany in the 1920s was a liberal democracy. Within a few years, that same society was killing millions of workers led by the Nazi Party. The causes of the holocaust, resulting in nearly  12 million people systemically killed, were a response to capitalism in crisis and showed that the only future for our class, the working class, is a communist revolution.
If we fail to understand this fact and instead accept liberal myths of Adolf Hitler’s evil as the cause, we will not understand how liberal capitalism today will follow down a similar path as German liberalism of the 1920s.

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Letters of March 3

Gorman’s poem whitewashes U.S. history
I don't like poetry stuffed with cliches. And, as a communist, I detest the deeply hypocritical American Exceptionalist doctrine that the United States is the standard-bearer for freedom and justice around the world. So while the mass media have been swooning over Amanda Gorman's delivery of her poem "The Hill We Climb" at the January 20 Presidential inauguration, I have been gritting my teeth.

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Book Review: Lessons from past communist organizing in Wisconsin

Stalin Over Wisconsin: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950 by Stephen Meyer documents the struggle to organize the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company in Wisconsin. At its peak, the factory employed over 10,000 workers.  In 1935 the Communist Party (CP) and United Auto Workers (UAW) both sought to organize the workers resulting in a red witch hunt that brought to light the limits of reform struggles and the need for a united and militant working-class revolution worldwide.
Role of the CPUSA
In 1935, the Communist Party took a direct role in the organizing campaign. They began to meet with workers from the plant to plan the campaign. However, in the book, Meyers makes no clear statement that any of the workers in the plant were members of the Communist Party. The company constantly attacked the worker’s organizing efforts as communist-led as did the AFL unions that had members in the plants. But the CPUSA did not respond to this red-baiting nor did it explain why communist leadership was important.
John Blair, an Alis-Chalmers worker and a communist, believed there were about 100 party members in the plant and most of them were shop floor leaders. The book gives no indication of what it meant to be a CP member other than to organize the fight against the bosses and to provide leadership in the 1939, 1941, and 1946 strikes.

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Navalny Protests Imperialist Russia’s: Internal contradictions fuel fascism

In recent weeks across Russia, tens of thousands of workers in over 100 cities have taken to the streets. Many have risked beatings and jailing to protest the bosses’ oppression and the arrest and imminent imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, the racist, arch-nationalist misleader who is challenging the fascist regime of President Vladimir Putin.
Workers united in militant solidarity can grind the bosses’ profit system to a halt. But when that passion is misdirected in defense of capitalist reformists like Navalny, workers cannot win. There are no good bosses! Though their strategies and tactics may differ, all capitalist rulers rely on racism, sexism, and the exploitation of the working class. They are driven by one principle: maximum profit.

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The Los Angeles ‘Shifters’: Homegrown communist fightback

LOS ANGELES, February 2—The fight to defend a working-class family and their home against the housing profiteers reveals the seeds of  communism.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has always said that the seeds of communism, the egalitarian society that we are fighting for, and that humanity deserves, are already present in everyday life. It is PLP’s historical role to nourish the growth of those seeds. We must prepare our new comrades for a lifetime of struggle. We will construct unbreakable political and personal bonds that will withstand all the blows from our class enemy and lead the international working class to victory in that fight. In the midst of multiple crises of capitalism, we in PLP are seeing small but important signs of this revolutionary potential for our class.

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