Letters of July 26

The following letters hail from participants of the Summer Project in Chicago. Over 50 students, parents, teachers, transit workers, and community organizers gathered to learn to fight against capitalism, and to fight to learn about communist consciousness. This multiracial, multi-generational, and multi-gendered group came from all corners of the country. These are reflections from the first day of a communist boot camp. See more next issue!
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I was so excited to participate in the 2017 Summer Project in Chicago where I met so many people committed to fighting for the working class.
During our first study group session, I shared my experience as a working-class student within the Brooklyn Public School System.
Sharing my experiences with fellow party members helped me to acknowledge how my high school is preparing me to face what the reality is for workers under Capitalism.
For example, School Safety Officers are posted at my school. Whenever I enter my school, in the morning or after a fire drill, I am treated like a prisoner. My school bag is searched. I feel like a criminal at my school because it is a place where I’m being taught to obey authority.
Many of the teachers in my school do not agree with security guards having a presence in our school. But the bosses at the DOE, who really run the schools, decide that students in working class neighborhoods should be treated like criminals.
I realize that the police presence in my school is only one part of a complex system that at every point mistreats and exploits workers, when I think about the poisoned food we’re given for lunch and the poisoned ideas we’re taught in the classroom.
It was important for me to share my experience with the comrades and friends in the room today because it allowed me to remember that I’m not the only one and my school is not the only school facing these issues.
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The workers of ATU local 241 voted in favor of the pre-strike authorization. It has been forty-eight years since they went on strike. PLP came out to do agitational work and support our working class brothers and sisters in transit. With the combination of rail and bus workers on strike, they have the potential to shut the city down. One worker came from the bus barn, walked across the sidewalk where the party was giving leaflets, and crossed the street to get a coffee before his shift at Dunkin Donuts. Before he went up the driveway to clock in for work, holding his coffee in one hand, he held out his other hand and said, “you guys can’t cross the line but I can because I work here. Give me a stack of the flyers to pass out.” Overall, the workers were responsive to the paper and realized we have their backs. The Chicago cops showed up multiple times only to be ignored as workers continued to take CHALLENGE.   
Later that day, a study group was held about Political Economy. It consisted of rich deep dwelling political ideology and the understanding of the capitalist wage system. During one part we discussed how the capitalist school systems teach false pseudoscience economics. They don’t talk about exploitation, workers as a commodity, exchange and use value, but we worked to understand the importance of those ideas. We also discussed how commodities would be produced for and by the working class under communism—for need, not for profit. Under capitalism the driving force is profit. Commodities are produced with little regard for use value. This results in alienation between the workers and their production, as well as overproduction and capitalist crisis. Other examples of economics under capitalism we discussed were how the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent millions for the purpose of destruction of food because if it can’t be sold then it must be destroyed.
The next time we go to talk to transit workers, we will bring back the ideas of political economy.  We know that political economy is a tool our class needs to destroy this system of exploitation and oppression. Workers striking is a great start! Class struggle has the potential to teach lessons that prepare us for revolution and show us the power of our class.
It is just a start though. No matter what reforms are passed because of the strike, no matter who becomes president—white or Black, man or woman—nothing will fix this rotten capitalist system. Asian, Latin, Black and white, workers of the world must unite to smash capitalism and this dark night.
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The summer project was lit! To start off the project, we woke up mad early at 3:00 in the morning to sell CHALLENGE to the Chicago Transit Authority bus drivers at 4 am. It was hard getting up that early but it helps us understand their struggle. My team had conversations with many workers who expressed their frustrations about low wages, long hours and lack of sleep. Imagine—we woke up at 3 am just one day, but these workers have to do this every day!
It was really great to connect with the workers and to ask questions and learn more about their struggles and their ideas about what needs to be done. Our comrades were aware that their contract is coming to an end and they might strike.
At our bus barn location, we decided to walk right into the building to the breakroom where the workers were, until the manager came out and told us we could not be there and had to move. When she left, we stormed right in to get to the workers as they were clocking in for their shift. That’s when we met a bus worker who is trying to organize his coworkers. We told him we gotta fight back, with multiracial unity, and sometimes break the rules of the union to fight back. He agreed.
He told us how he believes in supporting other workers, which is why he flew out to support the teachers’ strike in Ohio. It’s nice to know that many of our communist principles are still very much alive within the working class. My team and I got over 50 papers out and made some contacts—and we were just getting started!

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Frederick Douglass: July 4th Celebrates Criminals
U.S. rulers’ outpouring of patriotism for July 4th, with its band-playing parades and flag-waving, only serves to cover up their history of slavery. While the Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal” [though not women, much less Black people], Frederick Douglass, the great anti-slavery abolitionist leader, spoke to a July 4th gathering of the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society asking “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”
“I answer; a day that reveals…more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice to which [they are] the constant victim(s)….
“Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery;
“Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are [to them]…mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
“There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are…these United States, at this very hour.”
To this day, the celebration of “freedom” on July 4 lays bare the attempt by the ruling class to build blind patriotism and support of the U.S. war machine, in the face of mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Black workers, rampant police murder of Black women and men, mass deportations of workers across the bosses’ borders, and the capitalist exploitation of the entire working class. What freedom?
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Racist Clinton Debased Medgar Evers Students
On June 8, almost 54 years after Medgar Evers was assassinated for fighting segregation in the South, especially in higher education, his contribution to the struggle was debased when Hillary Clinton spoke at the commencement of CUNY’s Medgar Evers College and was given an honorary doctorate. Given Clinton’s support for her husband’s mass incarceration bill that put hundreds of thousands of Black workers and youth in jail, and his neo-liberal policies that undermined the few welfare programs that supported Black working-class families, I found the irony too outrageous to bear.
I wasn’t alone. Komokoda (a Haitian community group in New York) along with Peoples Power Assemblies organized a small protest outside the Medgar Evers graduation ceremony. I joined them, and we alternated between chanting and conversing among ourselves and with passersby. Several members of Komokoda were survivors of the 2010 earthquake. They were outraged by Clinton’s interference in the relief efforts—redistributing charity from the poor in Haiti to the Haitian, and multinational, ruling class. The protesters argued, rightfully, that Clinton’s commencement speech was just another step in her return to the public spotlight. We all recognized that there was no contradiction in opposing both Trump and Clinton.
Chants included “No resurrection for Hillary Clinton!” Slogans on protest signs addressed her dehumanizing, racist accusation in the 1990s that some black youths are “super-predators” with “no conscience, no empathy.” Other signs targeted Medgar Evers President Rudy Crew for allowing an important milestone in the lives of CUNY students to be twisted into a publicity event for Clinton’s resurrection as part of “the resistance” [against Trump’s presidency].
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