Letters of March 27

Communist school inspires youth for May Day
We had a big Communist PLP school on February 16 and 17 in South America, with more than 42 members and friends of the PLP participating from: Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and the United States; more than half were young people and a good number were women.
It was a wonderful experience; especially for those who hadn’t had the opportunity to experience this personally. We spoke about racism, sexism and the importance of fighting against these bosses’ ideas that are integral to this system. The discussion and camaraderie played an important role in committing ourselves to put into practice the Party’s line.
It was inspiring to see how the youth and veterans exchanged their knowledge about their experience in the struggle; the discussion displayed a lot of knowledge about PL’s politics.
We analyzed how the racist attacks against the working class, products of the capitalist crisis, makes living conditions within this capitalist system worse each day. We see how the betrayal of the old communist movement and the pseudo-left and union mis-leaders, have made workers very cynical in facing the bosses. We see how the bosses use our children in their violent wars for oil and their bloody profits, while they step up fascist attacks.
But our Party is still alive and present in workers’ lives, despite any temporary defeats. We explored how in reality little by little we have become an international party of the working class. We concluded that Challenge must be our main vehicle to spread our ideas and to report workers’ struggles in every corner of the globe against capitalist oppression and exploitation. We must learn from them.
Reports of our participation in the teacher strikes in Chicago and Haiti, and the participation of our comrades from Mexico in the Summer Project, were very inspiring to our young students and other comrades.
The leadership of young people in many countries have shown their potential of growth in our Party, especially the struggle against sexism which should be one of our daily tasks in building our base.
All of the criticism and self-criticism was very constructive in the school. It was two days of communist experience, where we shared our politics as well as our lives. This inspired the youth towards our goals for May Day to be more committed in mobilizing our friends and also in intensifying recruitment for PLP.
We said goodbye, singing excitedly the international anthem of the working class, firmly dedicated to building PLP and communism.
Comrade in Colombia

Great Train Robbery: Bankers Profit, Workers Pay
New York City’s racist bosses are ganging up on mass transit riders and workers who are mostly black, Latino and immigrant. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has raised fares for the fourth time in five years, handing the bankers who own the MTA a $450 million windfall.
Twenty percent of the MTA budget goes to “debt service” which allocates billions to Wall Street banker-bondholders. Obama also handed over hundreds of billions of our taxes to these same bankers who “failed” and his administration doles out tens of billions monthly to fund imperialist wars worldwide.
Department stores, shopping centers and real estate properties, which pay nothing for, and profit the most, from transit, would make 90 percent less profit without a mass transit system to provide them their customers, tenants and workers.
Workers must pay sales taxes on most everything they buy, yet bankers and their clients ride on transit to Wall Street where they sell a trillion dollars in stocks, bonds and debt daily without paying a nickel for sales taxes or transit. Masses of workers, many subsisting on poverty wages, and those jobless because of the bosses’ crisis, must fork over still more money to get to their jobs or to try to find one.
The transit union “leaders” never utter a peep about the tie-in of the banks, the MTA and the billions spent on the bosses’ wars, nor about the bankers’ gravy train of billions to cover “deficits.”
PLP fights for a communist system without profits, bankers and phony “deficits.” Workers will put these leeches six feet under.
Transit Worker

Django Unchained:Conceals Rebellions vs. Slavery
I thought that Django: Unchained was a good movie. Despite the fact that it is set in the pre-Civil War era of the United States, the movie had a sense of humor. It is also violent and gory. This violence was not in the form of the brutal treatment of slaves received from their masters. As a matter of fact, violence of this nature was severely downplayed. The movie had a few torture scenes; a “man-dingo” fighting scene; and a scene in which a male slave was eaten by dogs while still alive. Several characters mention how some female slaves were labeled as “comfort girls,” women who were forced to have sex with their masters and the master’s guests. None of that is shown on screen. The main form of violence came from the many gun fights that occurred throughout the movie. If you watch Quentin Tarintino films, the violence will not surprise you.
The two protagonists of the movie are Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter and Django, a slave who was separated from his wife. Early in the movie, Dr. Schultz frees Django from two slaveholders. Schultz’s motive is that he needs Django to identify some men who are wanted. As the two travel together, Schultz decides to make Django his partner.
Django: Unchained carries the misconception that the Southern states were the only bad guys. Most of the white southerners in the movie are slavers or just plain racist. The only character from the North is Dr. Schultz. At the beginning, Schultz tells the slaves they have just been freed, and are free to go to a more enlightened part of the country. In truth, the “enlightened” northern states benefited from slave labor. At the time the movie takes place, the Southern states’ main cash crop was cotton. This cotton was used in the Northern textile factories. Going back even further, when slaves were shipped from Africa, the North had a booming ship industry. Many products passed through its’ ports, slaves included.
For most of the movie, Schultz is the star of the show despite Django’s name being in the title. It’s Schultz’s actions which push the plot forward. Who frees Django? Schultz. Who does most of the negotiating? Schultz. Who does most of the planning to get them out of nasty situations? Schultz again. Django is able to become his own character after he and Schultz part ways, but by then the movie is almost over. Furthermore, this development was only possible because of Schultz. Django did little, if any of it alone. Django did not empower himself. Schultz did.
It is a shame that Django’s character wasn’t given more power. There are many examples from history to draw from. There were slaves who deceived their masters; slaves who escaped on their own; and slaves who organized others and led rebellions. Even if Django was empowered by Schultz, a saving grace in Django’s character could have been his desire to tackle the institution of slavery. Unfortunately, that potential is left untapped. Django is only interested in freeing his wife and riding off into the sunset.
Red movie-goer

Slave Labor: From Lincoln to Obama
From the mind of Abraham Lincoln who advocated shipping Negroes to some colony, with Congress paying the cost:
“I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality…” (Quincy, Illinois, 1858)
Union President Lincoln was a core racist who represented northern banking and textile industries. His main Civil War goal was to restore seceded southern states to Union control. Cotton produced by southern slave labor was a high-profit commodity that capitalists of that era went to war over, just as today’s imperialist war over the cheapest oil and gas resources.
But in 1863, after two years of military disasters, the Union army’s morale was devastated and faced troop shortages, draft riots and bankers’ resistance to more war loans. Lincoln offered the South a law guaranteeing 40 more years of slavery if they disarmed and rejoined the Union — to no avail. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation “freeing” southern slaves was a last desperate attempt to prevent a Union defeat by tying down Confederate troops trying to prevent slave escapees to the north and encouraging military enlistments of 200,000 brave, motivated ex-slaves (including 20 Medal of Honor winners) who turned a Union defeat into victory.
During the war, Lincoln ordered his generals to return escaped slaves to assure the South that he would not interfere with their profitable racist exploitation of blacks. After the war Union troops were withdrawn as soon as possible to prevent integration of “free” black soldiers with whites. This encouraged southern capitalists to create Jim Crow vagrancy laws that condemned former slaves to long-term chain-gang labor for the crime of being unemployed. Today a similar form of slavery continues with Obama’s approval of the mass incarceration of blacks and Latinos — 70 percent of the 2.4 million inmate population — many working in prison industries at slave wages because of notoriously racist drug laws.
The New York Times reports (1/5/13) on a 2010 book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander who confirmed: “Today there are more African American adults under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”
The history outlined above shows that although the laws and forms of capitalist terror have changed, racist oppression, wars and exploitation remain. And although our class has won many brave battles, we will never end this parasitic system that lives off our misery and death without struggling to bring discussion about the fight for communism into our organizing efforts.
A Comrade