Letters of March 2

Thanks for the Communist School
Thank you to all the members and leaders who had made the communist school in LA possible [see page 5]. I found it to be very educational, inspiring, and encouraging. I still hold my reservations that communism is the political ideology that could sustainably solve the crisis we face today, which I agree is the faults of a capitalist system. However, I am definitely coming away with a better understanding of the Party’s mission and methods, and where they do align with my own. I have been greatly inspired to increase my efforts to be a fighter in this common struggle.

LA Retreat ‘Lit as Hell’
West Coast party was lit as hell [see article page 5]. Got me to thinking about the Bolshevik revolutionary structure, the principle of democratic centralism and autonomy, and clarity on the political lines of the Progressive Labor Party.
As a rank and file educator, I dove into arguments about reform vs. revolution, identity politics, dialectical materialism in my other groups throughout the weekend. I got feedback on my frustrations and to key questions to ask them and myself.
Overall, the discussion was a very fruitful conversation and I would like to have more. PLP told me from jump street what they stood for and they showed it through their actions across the “united snakkkes” this past year.

Hawaii, Where There’s No Money
A local TV station, Khon2, recently carried a story headlined “Less money for the state means tough decisions for education.” Quotes from the story, which was broadcast statewide:
“The state is working with less money. That could mean important programs will not be getting the money they want. That’s because the state will not collect as much taxes as it thought it would. . . Lawmakers say that equates to $155 million less to spend this year. . . . The question now is just where the cuts will be made.” The story goes on to explain why the Education Department will be getting $40 million less than expected. (Oh well, our new president will ensure that wealthy capitalists, the people who count, will be given assistance to place their kids in private schools.)  
   In “unrelated” news on the same day, and not reported by Khon2, the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism projected a 4 percent growth in visitor expenditures in 2018.
The tourist industry employs approximately 150,000 blue collar/service workers. The average wage is $20/hour. Doing the math, there is roughly $10 billion in gross profits for the industry. The Waikiki district of Honolulu sits on land stolen from native Hawaiians.
An ex-carpenter friend, who helped build some of the Waikiki high-rise buildings points out that Eminent Domain is a legal principle inherent in U.S. and English Common Law. Accordingly, every inch of land in the U.S. ultimately belongs to the public, and can be taken by the government without compensation, as long as it is used for the good of the public. Pointing out the annual rise in homelessness, particularly among people of native background, he suggested: “Why don’t we start by claiming Waikiki?”
A better and more practical response from several of my friends: Let’s strengthen our group, which we call Hawaiian Friends of the Progressive Labor Party.

It Is Noh Mystery—We Makin’ History
I enjoyed the article “Black and Red: The Untold History” (CHALLENGE, 3/8). I wanted to mention a Red-inspired musician, inspired by the writings of Black communist W.E.B. DuBois, United Kingdom-based dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Johnson was born in Chapelton, in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, in 1962. After immigrating to the UK at the age of 11, attending university and being briefly involved with the British branch of the Black Panther Party, Johnson became a renowned poet. Johnson credited his turn to poetry to Dubois’ writings, which provided him a class analysis of racism in the UK.
The situation for Caribbean immigrants in the UK was intense in the 1970s. Following World War II, waves of immigrants in search of jobs from British-held Caribbean colonies settled in neighborhoods like the south London district of Brixton. Black immigrants endured constant racist terror and murder by the London police. One form that racist police terror took in London were the “Sus laws.”
“Sus laws,” short for “suspected person laws,” were the predecessors of today’s “stop and frisk” laws. Enacted in London in 1824 to justify imprisoning unemployed British military veterans, the Sus laws remained on the books for over a century, and were used with ferocity against the newly-arrived Caribbean immigrants in the 1970s.
It was against this background that Johnson composed his first poems. When he began performing with a reggae band in the background, he created the genre of dub poetry and became one of the precursors of modern rap music.
Life for the Black working class, and Johnson, took a sharp turn in 1980, when antiracist rebellions of Black youth against the Sus laws first exploded in UK city of Bristol. The rebellions spread over the following years: Brixton (London), Toxteth (Liverpool), Handsworth (Birmingham), Chapeltown (Leeds), among many other uprisings.
Johnson’s dub poetry and music evolved into celebrations of mass antiracist resistance and militant calls to action.
In “Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem)”, Johnson movingly recites a letter in Jamaican patois, written by a young Black worker to his mother from prison, imploring her to have courage. Other dub poems- “Di Great Insohreckshan,” “All We Doin is Defendin,” and “Fite Dem Back,” celebrate armed struggle against the police and neo-Nazis. “Reggae Fi Peach” is a powerful memorial to Blair Peach, a white antiracist schoolteacher murdered by the police, an instance of multiracial unity that profoundly moved Johnson and many Black workers. “Forces of Viktry” is an homage to the heroic masses fighting back “to defeat the state;” “Reality Poem” calls on workers to accept “science and technology” over “religion, antiquity and mythology;” while “Making History” furiously attacks anti-Black racism while embracing Asian immigrant workers in the neighborhood of Southall, London, who “formed up a human wall against the fascists and police shields” in solidarity with Black immigrant workers.
Johnson’s dub poetry is as catchy as it is politically sharp. Communists and antiracists would be hard pressed to find more inspiring calls for multiracial working class unity, or such heartfelt encouragements to draw our strength from the struggle, among the masses. The revolution may not be televised, but it already has a soundtrack—to remember past struggles of the international working class and to inspire new ones.

Nazis Emboldened by Trump, Antiracists Driven to Fight
Following the election of fascist Donald Trump, the struggle heated up in western Pennsylvania.
On December 28, 30-some spirited workers marched, chanted and rallied at the federal building in downtown Pittsburgh demanding that Martin Hernandez be released from prison. Hernandez, an immigrant worker from Mexico, was unjustly charged with a felony and faces possible deportation. At the rally, his wife and three children were introduced and a young woman fighter read a letter from Hernandez. The rally ended with another young woman singing a song of struggle.
In Johnstown, the local unity coalition organized a rally in central park to protest racist acts by a gang to local Klan types. These scums had been driving through the city, in a pick up truck flying the flag of slavery, a noose hanging from the tailgate and bearing a sign praising James Earl Ray, Dr. King’s assassin.
No doubt these vermin were emboldened by Trump’s election victory.
On the week of January 20, there were actions in Pittsburg. There was a rally to protest unemployment, a rally for sanctuary churches to defend immigrants, a women’s march, an anti-Trump action and an anti-racism conference.
Meanwhile, there have been numerous marches and rallies to protest Trump’s travel bans. Some copies of CHALLENGE were distributed at one of these actions.
None of these events called for an egalitarian workers’ state. But they open the doors for communists to intervene with revolutionary ideas.

Explain Both Continuity & Change in Trump Gov’t
CHALLENGE does an excellent job of stressing the continuity between Democrat and Republican administrations regarding the racist-fascist terror experienced by our immigrant sisters and brothers. They are all fascist butchers sending untold numbers to their deaths by deportation!
But, with Donald Trump, there is a qualitatively new ideological factor that we must relentlessly expose. The overt fascist that Trump has appointed to daily call the shots for his White House policy is Stephen Bannon. This racist ideologue, in turn, swears allegiance to Julius Evola. Evola was one of the master ideologues who powered the fascism that developed in Italy and Germany with genocidal result, from 1920 to 1945. Read the article “Steve Bannon Cites Italian Thinker Who Inspired Italian Fascists,” Jason Horowitz (NYT, 2/20). “Evola eventually broke with the Italian fascists because he considered them overly tame. Instead, he preferred the NAZI SS officers [who] shared his anti-Semitism!”
The U.S.  bosses may dump Trump because  he is an unreliable “loose cannon.” But he is doing their bidding consistently in a vital regard: building overt racism broadly and deeply, particularly anti-Muslim racism. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama failed to expand the vicious, mass imperialist-racist consciousness desperately needed to fuel a huge U.S. fighting force that might prevail in World War III’s redivision of the profit-generating territories of the earth.  Trump is dong this. We must expose him and fight him.

Stress and Cuban Babies
A letter in the March 8 CHALLENGE made a good point about how life stress, including the stress of racism, is bad for workers’  health. Besides heart disease and stroke mentioned by that writer, premature birth and infant deaths have also been linked to stress, especially
stress during pregnancy.
On a recent tour of health facilities in Cuba I learned something about how that country, with a fraction of the United States’ per capita income, managed to achieve a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. (Cuba has had a lower infant death rate
than the U.S. since about 2003.) Cubans all still have access to high quality medical care. I have seen their newborn units and they are high quality. But that is not the way they outperform the U.S. in infant survival.
Our group toured a maternity home where any woman with an increased risk of going into premature labor can go and live free of charge, together with other expectant mothers from her community. Women with any situation that might increase their risk of premature labor—high blood pressure, anemia, social stress at home, being under 20 or over 35 years of age or having ever had a premature or low birth weight baby in the past—any such condition means she is free to move into the Hogar Materno where there is a nurse 24 hours a day, a doctor on call, and all the cooking and housework are done by others. Her family can visit her whenever they want and she can leave if she chooses. But the amazing fact for me was that there are enough maternity home beds in Cuba so that on average every woman giving birth in that country could have about two weeks in a home if she wanted or needed it.
Since most pregnancies are low risk in Cuba, those who do need such a low stress often end up staying there for months. And then they give birth at term, instead of having a premature baby who might die or have handicaps.
However, Cuba is changing fast, moving into full-blown capitalism from the state monopoly capitalist system established in the 1960s. That system still provides certain socialistic features, such as free health care and education. The Cuban birth rate for very small (under three pound) babies is about two thirds as high as the U.S. rate. Will the focus on stress prevention that achieved this remarkable health outcome soon end? It is hard to see how such expansive preventive care will be maintained as the profit system takes firmer hold on Cuba, but it is also not clear that the Cuban people will see their world-class health system—and population health statistics—be destroyed without some serious pushback.

Response to Berkeley: No Free Speech for Fascists
I was interested in the CHALLENGE article (2/22) about the antiracist upheaval in Berkeley against the fascist speakers there. I have never thought that fascists should have freedom of speech and I was uplifted to hear that this speaker was shut down.
Back in the 1990s, when the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi skinheads were attempting to colonize the coalfields of western Pennsylvania, the Coal Country Coalition (CCC) organized anti-fascist rallies at the site of the racist rallies. We were never concerned with freedom of speech for these fascists. Instead, we attempted to shout them down and disrupt their gatherings.
On one such occasion, an anti-fascist sang “Light My Fire” by The Doors over a sound system while another burned a confederate flag. One of the lines of the song went, “Come on baby, light my fire. Try to set the night on fire.”
 This drove C. Edward Foster the Klan leader, into frenzy while the rest of these racists seemed to be dazed and confused. The CCC always attempted to be creative in their approach to the Klan.
Concerning the situation in Berkeley, I read that anarchists played a role in silencing the fascist speaker. The anarchists make a major error by attempting to substitute themselves for the working class in the fight against fascism. It is only the working-class led communist party that can defeat fascism.
Finally, the CCC always distributed a leaflet at the antifascist rallies connecting the Klan and racism to the entire capitalist system. It also called for an egalitarian workers state. I’m glad the Party was able to do the same thing at the Berkeley action. In some ways, this might be more important than slewing the fascist scum.