Letters of of September 2

Multiracial Fightback is Healing
I remember leaving Ferguson feeling like a winner. I felt like we showed the bosses that they couldn’t fuck with us there. The people who mattered (working people from that community) felt like we had their back and everyone recognized that we were there to show unity with those oppressed there: multiracial unity. At the Movement for Black lives conference it felt different. Our multiracial groups were getting attacked during the workshops and rallies. The organizers of the conference choose healing over fighting racism as the focus of the discussion. There were some parts of the conference that were moving, such as the opening ceremony, where dozens of families whose family members were killed told the crowd about how their family member was before being murdered. To me, this was more of a reason to talk about fighting racism but the organizers still decided to focus on healing.
Although the conference was overall more superficial than substantive, the most encouraging part of it all was the anti-capitalist sentiment among the Black working-class people. For PLP the focus was discussing multiracial unity during the conference but in the long run, as we work to dismantle capitalism we hope the attendees choose smashing our whole system over Black capitalism or nationalism. I hope the next conference is more about fighting back than healing and if so, we will be in a great position to win over more of the Black working class.
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Exploitation: Basis for Workers’ Unity
The Progressive Labor Party always tries to clarify that the condition for most white workers and their families is one of oppression – less, in general, than the oppression experienced by Black workers, but oppression nonetheless.  There is, therefore, an objective basis for unity of the oppressed.
All of this is true, and was well stated in the August 12 CHALLENGE in the article, “White Comrades, Not Allies.” But in this case, it might have been more precise to consider the concept of exploitation, rather than oppression.  
In short, exploitation is what the capitalists absolutely require in order to make the very profit that keeps them alive as capitalists.  Oppression, on the other hand, while including exploitation as one of its many forms, is a much broader concept that is related to exploitation mainly through its supporting role.  The capitalists need to oppress the working class in order to make it possible for them to exploit the workers, without hindrance from workers’ resistance, and for no other reason.  It’s not that they are sadists who have a psychological need to make people’s lives miserable.  Rather they have a material need to exploit in order to make profit or die as capitalists.  And for that they need oppression.  The central point for the capitalists, however, is exploitation.  They oppress in order to exploit, and not the other way around.  
Oppression takes a tremendous number of forms, while exploitation takes only one form – paying only for labor power (what it takes to keep a worker and her/his family alive day to day) while reaping the benefit of labor time (embodied in what workers produce).  Oppression occurs, for example, in segregation, high rents for poor housing, impoverished and mis-aimed education, racist discrimination, media lies, cop killings, drug infestation, gang encouragement, mass incarceration, unemployment, being used as cannon fodder, and sexist violence.
The fact is that the primary basis for unity between Black and white workers is precisely that both are exploited – that is, the bosses steal from both and from all. That fact Black and white workers share, while the many forms of oppression they often do not share, or at least the intensity of those various forms are not shared.  Of course, the intensity of exploitation is often not shared either, but the Black/white income differential owes at least as much to different job and education opportunities as it does to unequal pay for equal work (a point, by the way that we have not made clear when we speak of the billions of dollars reaped from racism). 
Once it is said about exploitation that all workers are its victims, the false concepts of white skin privilege and nationalism can more easily be tossed out the window, because no one who is robbed cares that someone else was robbed of more, or for that matter of less.  To be robbed is to be robbed.  As a basis of unity, the need to throw off exploitation is the heart of the need for unity among all workers.
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