Letters of April 19

Racist Deportation Over a Turnstile
We were already angry at deportations and other fascist attacks against the working class, especially against Black, Latin, and Asian workers.
Now it’s happening to one of our members at our church. Our dear friend has become a victim of the fascist directives that started with former “Deporter-in-Chief” Obama and are continuing with Trump.
Our friend came to the U.S. when she was seven years old. Both her and her father are green-card holder (a permanent resident). As an adult, she became hooked on drugs while seeking escape from a horribly abusive marriage. A drug dealer in her housing project falsely identified her as also a drug dealer. Terrified by the cops’ and prosecutors’ threats of a long imprisonment, she pleaded guilty. Our racist criminal justice system uses this tactic to incarcerate millions of our mainly Black and Latin sisters and brothers.
Our friend was fortunate to find a devoted lawyer who obtained a pardon for her previous conviction and proceeded with the process for citizenship. In 1998, desperate to get to her low-wage job on time so she could support her family, the cops stopped her for jumping a turnstile and she was eventually convicted of “theft of services.”  What hypocrisy!  The bourgeoisie steals our services every day.
In the summer of 2015, she learned that the government was going to deport her for the “crime” of jumping the turnstile! Her first appearance before a judge was postponed when a blizzard hit NYC.
We remain committed to fighting for our friend. Twenty-six members of our church have signed on, along with the pastor and church board to stand with her and her family to fight against her racist deportation. The chief regional pastor commended our member’s actions and pledged his support for the thousands of members throughout the region who face the same threats.
We will fight our dear friend’s deportation and build solidarity with our sisters and brothers worldwide. But only with communist revolution, will we once and for all, put an end to the racist and sexist attacks on working people everywhere.

Evaluating Cultural Revolution with Workers in China
When PLP was founded over 50 years ago, the main source of our ideological support came from the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. In 1967, a few years after its founding, PLP disagreed with the actions taken by the CCP leadership (including Mao Zedong) during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, more than 40 million Red Guard workers, students and farmers were in open rebellion, attempting to defeat revisionism in the CCP and move toward a fully equal, communist society.  Initially encouraged by Mao to defeat the more open right wingers in the CCP, Mao then branded them as “ultra-leftists” and used the Peoples Liberation Army to suppress them. PLP criticized the CCP and warned against the restoration of capitalism should the Cultural Revolution be defeated. The CCP broke off fraternal party relations with PLP over this disagreement in 1970.
PLP’s analysis of events in China, and our break with nationalism as a sometimes “progressive” ideology, was published in the document “Road to Revolution III” in 1971. Our criticism of the CCP as becoming a revisionist party shocked many “Maoist” parties around the world.
Fast forward a half century. China is a fully capitalist country which now has some 250 million industrial workers, the largest industrial proletariat in the world. The CCP is still the ruling party, which says they preside over “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” an absurd claim that is mocked inside China.
It turns out there are still communists in China; they just don’t run the government. Recent contacts with communists, inside and outside China have been encouraging. Some have shown an interest in PLP’s analysis from 1971, and Road to Revolution III was recently translated into Chinese so that it can be read and evaluated by more workers there.
One young worker recently described a study group discussion of Road to Revolution III. Mao is still considered a great revolutionary leader, as opposed to the current capitalist class that occupies the CCP, so criticizing him is controversial in leftist circles. However, this worker wrote:
“Mao is a great leader. But he failed in the fight against revisionism. We have to draw some important lessons to accomplish this task. If we cannot tell Mao’s achievements and mistakes, we cannot step further on the road to revolution.”
“The road is long and tortuous but the future is bright.”

Movie More Anti-Racist Than Given Credit
The review in Challenge of “I Am Not Your Negro” made a good point about how racism oppresses white workers as well as Black. But the review contained some factual errors.
Many of the images in the movie showed integrated groups of people fighting racism and many people standing up to very brutal attacks by the police at demonstrations. It also had scenes of Baldwin being very well received by groups of white students when he speaks against racism. The movie also says racism was created to have cheap labor, though it doesn’t go into detail about how that works and showed images of Black workers picking and processing cotton. In a segment mentioned in the article, Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry (a communist writer) confront Robert Kennedy and expose him as unwilling to fight racism. That’s good!
Baldwin put forward the position that the fate of all of us in the United States is tied together. That was the main position of the movement as the time. It reflected an acceptance of nations, something Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers all accepted.

Iron Heel Relevant to Today’s Fascism
Following the inauguration of fascist demagogue Trump, the sales of George Orwell’s 1984 and Sinclair Lewis’ Can It Happen Here? Skyrocketed on Amazon. 1984 deals with a totalitarian society ruled by Big Brother, which we can call Big Trump, and Can It Happen Here? Discusses fascism coming to this country waving the American flag. It is clear that many workers are becoming aware that something is desperately wrong and are looking for answers. One U.S. novel that is seldom mentioned and which is extremely relevant today is Jack London’s classic The Iron Heel. Written in 1907, some have claimed that it was a prophetic novel about the rise of fascism in the world.
London is best known for his adventure novels such as Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf, but London had been a left-wing socialist for many years. The Iron Heel grew out of his socialist convictions and his belief that a kinship of working people would become a reality on the planet. The novel is told from the standpoint of Avis Everhard, the daughter of a wealthy man and is unaware of the human suffering that is caused by the capitalist system. She meets Ernest, a revolutionary socialist agitator and theoretician. She falls in love with him, later marries him, and he shows her the realities of life for the workers in capitalist America. She, to put it in her words, began “to see through the appearances of the society in which I had all was lived, and to find the frightful realities that were beneath”.
Ernest also argues passionately against capitalist ideologues, who are totally out of touch with the realities of life under capitalism and the Middle class, which Ernest claims, want to return to an imaginary past. He calls them “Machine Breakers” or Luddites. Ernest claims that labor saving machinery will be used for the liberation of the working class. Of course, the middle class, as we find out, is doomed by historical development as the trusts or oligarchy gain more and more power. It is this group of capitalists that would usher in the iron heel, London’s term for fascism.
The real target of the rulers was the working class and the socialist movement that was making strides at the ballot box. This leads to a discussion of voting vs. armed struggle and eventually the resistance to the iron heel picks up a gun. Also, the Iron Heel attempts to buy off a segment of the workers or labor castes, while the majority of the workers face grinding poverty. It becomes clear that the goal of the ruling class is to save the capitalist system and prevent a worker’s revolution.
The capitalist class also shuts down the socialist party printing presses, disappears worker-fighters, murders scores of workers and uses agents provocateurs to undermine the workers movement, while rounding up and jailing workers and socialists in the congress, including Ernest. The workers do not take any of this lying down and begin to resist through revolutionary violence. At one point, they are able to free some of their comrades from prison. Ernest is one of them, and he is reunited with Avis.
The conditions that London describes facing the workers exist today, as does a powerful capitalist ruling class. This novel, if read, might alert workers to the growing fascism in this country while providing an interesting read.

Review Wrongly Attacks the Man, Not Content
The review of I Am Not Your Negro (CHALLENGE, 4/5) was one sided and under researched. The claim that Baldwin lacked class analysis in his works is incorrect. Baldwin often talked and wrote about his experience as a young Black man living in poverty and how those Blacks that had “means” treated him.
Examples are in Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) and “Another Country” (1962). His literature uses social class as one of the lenses through which characters analyze their realities. In his essay, “Negroes Are Anti-Semetic Because They’re Anti-White” (1967), Baldwin discusses the exploitation suffered by poor Black people in Harlem at the hands of Jewish slum lords and store owners, as well as Black and white social workers, teaches, postal bosses, and the military. This essay ends with Baldwin addressing the very real tension between Black workers and Jewish owners and his own refusal to hate a person or even a group for the ills of an exploitative system that is less vicious to some than others depending on the time.
There are valid critiques of Baldwin’s outright refusal to officially join social movements. This review went from criticizing the movie to trying to discredit Baldwin and his work entirely. How can we totally dismiss someone for their own analysis of their reality? Who does that win, other than those made uncomfortable by Baldwin’s existing anti-racist stance on things like education, nationalism, patriotism, militarism?
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is putting it lightly when comparing what this article tries to do with Baldwin’s legacy of literary investigation of social problems in the U.S.