Letters of July 29

A Hundred Anti-Racist
Conversations
I am a member of the Kyam Livingston Justice Committee and have been active in meetings and demonstrations for 23 months. I’ve been constantly bringing the news back to the church I attend.
At a recent church convention, I discussed this struggle with more than 100 people in individual conversations. I was wearing a “Justice for Kyam Livingston” t-shirt with dozens of anti-racism buttons attached around her picture.
I did not need to approach other people; they came over to me. I told them the story of how she had died in police custody due to medical neglect and most people gave me a donation towards the struggle, for which I gave them an anti-racism button. They told me stories about the heinous crimes of this system against all workers — whether it was the mentally ill, the poor, women, gays, underpaid workers, undocumented immigrants.
I am more impressed than ever that the road to developing a movement is always through the working class. We should always be talking to people, no matter if we meet with them for two minutes or an hour. No matter if we see them regularly or only once in a while. We have a world to gain and only our fears and chains to lose.
★ ★ ★ ★
FDR Needed Lynchers
One could add to the excellent article exposing the massive lynchings of Black people in the U.S. (CHALLENGE, 7/1) to reveal how President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) refused to support the anti-lynching campaign mounted during his four-team presidency. During the 1930s and ’40s, communists led a movement to pass an anti-lynching law but Roosevelt refused to back it. With the Great Depression sparking ideas of revolution against capitalism, he collaborated with the racist Southern Senators “to save the system”:
“Several thousand blacks were killed by lynching in the United States.…Southern Senators angrily filibustered [the legislation] and FDR…refus[ed] to throw his support behind the measure….Roosevelt said, ‘I’ve got to get legislation passed…to save America. The Southerners…occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill…they will block every bill…to keep America from collapsing’ (David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 1929-1945; p. 210).
Roosevelt has been hailed by liberal historians as a “friend of the working people,” but his “New Deal did little to advance the cause of racial equality in America” (“Race in FDR’s New Deal,” Shmoop.com). His alliance with Southern racists ensured the super-exploitation of Black people. “Domestic workers and agricultural laborers — the leading employment sectors for black women and men respectively — were excluded from many of the benefits of labor legislation and social security” (Lorena Hickok, et. al., One-Third of A Nation: Reports on the Great Depression; U. of Illinois, 1981, p. 154).
No matter what reforms were instituted to save capitalism — most of which were the product of militant, communist-led mass movements — Roosevelt followed the path of maintaining the profit system to continue the exploitation of the working class, and especially of Black workers.
★ ★ ★ ★
Black Panthers:
Vanguard of the
Counter-Revolution
Both the film, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and the related letter in CHALLENGE (July 15) mostly overlook the main weakness of the Black Panther Party: an ideology of Black nationalism and guerrilla adventurism. By contrast, Progressive Labor Party stands for multiracial, internationalist, working-class unity and mass revolutionary violence.
PLP understands that all forms of nationalism spring directly from capitalism. Nationalism—along with racism and sexism, its partners in crime—is the bosses’ main tool to divide, deceive, and exploit the working class. It misleads workers into the fatal trap of false unity and identity with a group of bosses, whether defined by nationality or the anti-scientific concept of race.
The Panthers’ corrupt ideology led inevitably to corruption in practice, from its top leaders’ drug addictions and gutter sexism to Bobby Seale’s mayoral candidacy in Oakland. It’s no surprise that Seale has spent the last quarter-century as a barbecue entrepreneur—he was always a capitalist at heart. And it’s no surprise that the New Black Panther Party endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008. That’s the end game for all nationalists: cutting opportunistic deals with mass-murdering enemies of the working class.
It should be noted that right-wing forces in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who would soon devolve into the Weathermen, used Black Panther Party forces to attack PLP. At the final SDS convention in 1969 in Chicago, when our Party won a majority of the organization to support the Worker Student Alliance and multi-racial unity in the fight against racism, the right-wingers had a BPP spokesman deliver a vicious, sexist speech attacking PLP.
Although the BPP paid lip service to the need for armed revolution and socialism, the organization’s practice was essentially counter-revolutionary.
★ ★ ★ ★
PL Exposes Phony Anti-Racists
I attended the annual Unitarian General Assembly hosted this year in Portland, Oregon, along with other PLP comrades. It was quite the event and I got to learn a lot about the politics of the Unitarian Church. Sadly, its politics, as with everything else in a capitalist society, are controlled by right-wing, ruling-class agents.
There were workshops that delegates and non-delegates could attend. The most reactionary and racist one was sponsored by the Diverse Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries, or DRUUMM, and the Young Adult Office, called “You are home : Supporting Youths/Young Adults of Color.” This was a clever con game trying to come off as progressive, but it was anything but that.
The two moderators started by having a multiracial group of attendees identify themselves by the question: ‘’What race do you consider yourself? Black, white, Asian, or other?”
People started going along with this nonsense. I raised my hand, and said, “Why is it so important to identify ourselves by designations created 300 years ago to justify slavery and oppression? Its outrageous for you to ask such a thing to divide us up! The only race is the human race!”
PLP lost out on getting a left-wing communist platform adopted, but we got out 100 CHALLENGEs, plus leaflets. Also, we made contacts, and got out communist ideas about the need for revolution globally! We will do better next time!
★ ★ ★ ★
What I Learned at a
Communist Wedding
You wouldn’t know it was a communist wedding just by looking at it. But then came the clues. First, the officiant welcomed friends, family and comrades.
Then, he moved swiftly into a spiel on the sexist history of marriage, before promising the couple that, nevertheless, they could create a unique, equal union.
Weddings are built of stories. How a couple met, fell in love, what each of them is like. What their future holds, what their love means to each other and to the group.
And in a communist wedding, what their loves means to the revolutionary struggle.
“The ruling class of Los Angeles should be shaking in their boots,” the officiant quipped. The crowd laughed. He was a very funny communist.
He quoted Karl Marx, Che Guevara, and even Jesus (the revolutionary).
The way some priests talk of God, this orator expounded on the dream of a communist future.
During her vows, the bride talked of how love blossomed when the couple went to Ferguson to protest after the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for Michael Brown’s death and were arrested. The groom had himself locked up so he could be with her; he found a way to hold her hand in jail.
At a communist wedding, there are frequent references to protests, arrests and the police. Also: frequent praise for elders, now in their 60s.
I had believed communism was mostly ideological history, laid to rest after the Cold War. What could anyone find in it in now? I wondered.
The wedding had the answer. The guests behaved like a village, bound so tightly that it was hard to tell who was related by blood. They shared a bond of more than love. It’s a common path.
For a Catholic at an atheist communist wedding, it felt oddly familiar to see love bound up in a belief about a life worth living.
I had to hand it to the happy couple. Who gets married these days not just to change their own lives, but the world?
★ ★ ★ ★