Letters of September 16

Straight Outta Ferguson
This summer I traveled with friends to Ferguson, MO to stand united with the anti-racist fighters there on the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s murder. We spent time on Florissant Rd. where the center of fightback has occurred. On the streets of Ferguson there is a sentiment among masses of people that you can fight the racist terror of the police and you can win!
As we spent more time in the community, we visited the neighborhood and spot where Mike Brown was murdered. We spoke with residents about the killing and the year of fightback. We talked about Challenge and the need to build a party around multi-racial unity to end these racist attacks once and for all.
We met a woman who lives in an apartment overlooking the spot where Brown was murdered. Speaking with her highlighted the ways in which the bosses have attempted to erase the memory of Brown and the anti-racist struggle in Ferguson.  
She first pointed out that almost no one is aware of a security camera located on the corner of her building. The camera was installed well before the incident occurred and overlooks the exact spot where Mike Brown’s body fell. The footage from the camera has never been seen despite requests from residents to view the tape. She also said that friends of hers who recorded the entire shooting had their cameras and phones confiscated by police and never returned.
As we talked, she pointed to a community memorial for Mike Brown that is located in the middle of the street where Brown died. The memorial is made up of stuffed animals, flowers, and balloons. She explained how the memorial has been destroyed several times by vandals under police protection. Despite these attempts to erase the memory of Brown, the community continues to rebuild the memorial. The family has attempted to make this  “unofficial“ memorial permanent. However, the city would not approve a memorial in the street and in order to draw attention away from where the incident occurred, approved an “official” memorial located on a sidewalk hundreds of feet away.
As we ended our conversation, she pointed to the apartment buildings in the area. She explained that most of the units were empty because many of the residents have moved out. She told us how the apartment complex owners had illegally gone into resident’s apartments in order to find evidence of illegal activity that could be used to threaten them. Fearing attacks from the police, many residents have left. She explained that by forcing the residents who witnessed the incident out of the neighborhood, the slumlord apartment owners and local police force work together in an attempt to stifle the anti-racist fightback in Ferguson.
This experience taught me that the working class is open to our ideas of multi-racial unity. Many workers understand that the racist police murders are part of a larger system of oppression and exploitation of the working class. The more workers we know, the more we will know about what is happening to our class. The experience of Ferguson has taught and will continue to teach our party and our members invaluable lessons in how we can wage war against the bosses and their racist system.
★ ★ ★ ★
Israel,U.S — Same Struggle
I am a member of the party in Israel-Palestine since 2010. This year, for the first time, I attended the Summer Project in New York City. This taught me much about the local way of political work. I also had a chance to meet friends and comrades from all around the world. I saw that the struggles we have here in Israel-Palestine are the same kind of struggles others are fighting worldwide: sexism, racism, and the class struggle. Therefore all around the world, we are fighting the same war: to fight against capitalism. Racism and sexism will die with it. We also all fight against borders, which are barriers that divide and conquer workers.
★ ★ ★ ★
PLP, not Politicians!
This year marked the 3rd annual Hoops for Justice basketball tournament. This yearly event is hosted by the friends, family and community of Shantel Davis and Kyam Livingston, two Black women gunned down by the racist NYPD. Hoops for Justice is about commemorating their lives, bringing the community together, and demonstrating that we will keep fighting back! I was standing at PLP’s literature table, lined with our anti-racism buttons, pens, and CHALLENGEs. Among the goodies were t-shirts that said, “Don’t vote. Revolt!” A man came up to me and asked if the shirt meant that we should vote for communists, or if it meant that we shouldn’t vote at all. I replied that we need to get rid of the system because racism is the bedrock of capitalism, and a different politician won’t change that fact. He claimed to agree, but then said that it was the same thing as telling people not to work even though we need to eat. His argument was so absurd that I barely knew how to respond, but I told him that work is necessary in order to produce essential goods like food and shelter. The key difference between work under capitalism and communism, however, is that we control our own labor power under communism and that it is not exploitative.  On top of that, the difference between work and voting is that one is essential for society to work while the other is not. He kept incessantly repeating his argument that we are telling people not to work before eventually realzing he had been beat, shrugging, and walking away.
Unbeknownst to me, this man was a local politician who is idolized in the community. Right after our conversation, he took photos with the Black youth participating in the tournament and left without socializing or getting involved in the activities. This conversation and his photo-op reinforced the fact that politicians have little substance. Their arguments are hollow and they do little for the working class unless it makes themselves look better. PLP, on the other hand, fights in the streets with the working class and makes clear-cut, common sense analyses of the system. Today strengthened my belief that the answer to this racist, oppressive system lies not with democratic politicians but with revolutionary communism and PLP.
★ ★ ★ ★
Washroom breeds Communists
The other day, I went into a public restroom where several women were waiting for an open stall. There were two stalls and the lock on the door of one of them was broken.  The women were patiently waiting their turn for the other one. I mentioned that we could hold the door closed for each other so we could use the one with the broken lock. They all said they’d rather wait. Instead of waiting, I asked one of them if she’d hold the door for me. She agreed and then when I was done, she was happy to have me hold the door for her.
It occurred to me that this was a small example of how capitalism and communism train us to think. Unlike communism, capitalism trains us not to rely on others and not to think outside the box. Just imagine when our class has the power to put into practice the best solutions to all our problems big and small. What a wonderful world it will be!
★ ★ ★ ★
Class Struggles in the Confederacy
I often wondered what it would be like living in Nashville during the U.S. Civil war. After reading Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams, I thought that I would have found many likeminded antiracists.
Mr. Williams makes the fine point that the first distinction of the civil war is one of class. The big difference is the division between the Slave owning class and the non-slave owning class. The slave owning elite owned all the fertile land and wanted to maximize their profits by growing the money crops of cotton and tobacco. They needed thousands of slaves to cultivate these crops. This elite class controlled the political structure that wanted to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America where slavery could flourish.
The non-slave owning class could see no purpose in fighting this war, but they were called upon to furnish the soldiers. They were promised by the elites that the soldiers and their families would be taken care of and fed by the Confederates. From the very beginning these promises turned into lies.
First, the cash crops of cotton and tobacco occupied all the fertile land and sufficient land to grow food was not available. The planter class also exempted themselves from serving in the military, which caused resentment and hatred among the fighting soldiers, who called it a rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight. Desertions from the Confederate Army started practically from the beginning of the war especially after they instituted conscription.
Southern women played a brave and important role in weakening the Army of the South. They hid and protected the deserters and draft-dodgers from the Confederacy. Since there were food shortages caused by the planter’s refusal to grow food, the southern women organized raids on the food warehouses and distributed it among the hungry.  
In addition, the slaves and ex-slaves worked with Confederate deserters and union sympathizers. They also joined the union armies. Aside from these activities the slaves also sabotaged and spied on the confederate soldiers’ movements.
When supporters of the flag talk about the heritage of the confederate flag, they should remember that most non-slave owning workers were opposed to the war and that the Union Army was made up of 25% Southerners. The cover of the book, which displays a generic Civil War soldier holding a U.S. flag and a Confederate flag in Double Springs Alabama, depicts the irony of those who refer to Southern heritage when claiming the flag. The statue depicted represents the soldiers from the area who volunteered to fight in the war: 239 for the Union and 112 for the Confederacy.
★ ★ ★ ★

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.
★ ★ ★ ★
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.
★ ★ ★ ★

Letters of August 12

Young Fighters Toughen Up
The following three letters are from PL’ers and friends who participated in the Black Lives Matters Convention

The trip to the Black Lives Matter Convention opened my eyes to the realities of Black Nationalism. It was disturbingly clear throughout this event that ultimately Black-only spaces reinforce ideas of racism and dupe honest working-class people into the false promise of healing, and only served to open old wounds while igniting hostile nationalistic fervor. I’m now cognizant that the purpose of the Black Lives Matter organization is not the so-called liberation of Black workers, but their imprisonment under Black capitalists.
★
As a multiracial group, my comrades and I attended the Black Lives Matter (BLM) convention the weekend of July 24. Instantly, we were met with hostility by the organizers and were confronted for being a multiracial group by the founders and organizers of BLM.
The organizers wanted to know how we “identify” ourselves, stating this is a space for Black people to heal. They targeted our two white comrades. The coordinator asked if they could leave. We said, “Do you have a separate space for our white comrades to go to?”
 “No, but we’re working on it,” they responded.
We said, “we’ve came together, we fight together, and we’re staying together.” We then headed to our first workshop.
The workshop we attended was titled “turn down on ourselves, turn up on the state.” It was going well until one of the “healers” of BLM led the attack against the white participants and then proceeded to attack our Black comrades who spoke up for multiracial unity. We held our ground, saying that if you are serious about fighting racism, you can’t operate under the laws of racism. We can never be a threat to the rulers if our class remains divided. The only way for workers to heal is by fighting back.
After feeling a bit dejected for getting kicked out, we still decided to have a rally the next day. We got into a scuffle with the BLM for having a rally against racism. We stood together and fought back when they tried to attack our female comrade and take the bullhorn. A few participants in the crowd assisted in physically defending us against the leadership’s attack. We left chanting, “Racism means, we got to fight back!”
We had a forum afterwards. Many of us were shaken up and wanted to cancel the forum, but the collective chose to stay. Out of frustration and fear, one comrade walked out before the forum began.
One hour later, we had five people join our forum. We openly discussed communism and the possibility of an armed revolution. We made great contacts. Some BLM participants said, “What happened to you was messed up.” Our new friends and then joined us at a town hall meeting of families who lost their kids to racist police terror.
This trip taught me that fighting back is healing. Also, we need to fight against individualism. We are stronger together than apart. This event only lit my fire for the fight for a communist future. If you’re not fighting racism, you are maintaining capitalism. Join the Fight!
★
I attended the Movement for Black Lives convention in Cleveland with Black Lives Matter (BLM) Gary. What I saw at this convention disgusted me. BLM Gary is a multiracial group that fights racism together. We were told via email that this was a “Black only convention,” that Black people needed “a place were they can feel safe,” and that white people need not come. “What kind of Jim Crow bulls--t is this?!” one member of our group said. We came to a collective decision not to honor the racist rule. Plain and simple, it is segregation and divides the working class.
Upon arriving, we attended the workshop “Whose World is This? The World is Ours.” At the start, there were six Black people and one Asian person in the room, plus our five multiracial members of BLM Gary. While we waited for the moderators, we all talked and had a lot of questions about fighting racism. When the moderators showed up, we started with an introduction before they asked if “everyone identifies as black.” One moderator asked the Asian worker and our white comrade to leave to create a “safe place for black people.” We stated that you can’t fight racism with more racism and that it is anti-working class to segregate people. BLM Gary stood our ground and fought for our comrade, so she stayed and we all tried to continue with the workshop.
However, instead of discussing the real issue, racism, the moderators continued to attack the idea of white workers in an “all Black space.” When the moderator stated that we needed a “cool down” session and asked all the “non-black people” to please leave, all BLM members just got up and walked out together.
In a nutshell, the so-called leaders of this movement are trying to take Black workers’ anger towards this system and pacify it with “safe spaces,” “speak-out sessions,” “healing,” and “attacking white people” instead of fighting racism and capitalism. The misleaders of the Movement for Black Lives will take good people, people who want to truly fight racism, and mislead them to the bosses’ politics and more of the same. We learned a lot at this conference: we MUST build a base in the working class, bring our ideas to more Black workers, and get them to join the Party.
★ ★ ★ ★
Bengali Shipbreakers Must Break Their Chains
This week a comrade and I went to a screening of a documentary about Bangladesh, called Iron Crows. The documentary is by a South Korean film director who follows workers known as “shipbreakers” in the Chittagong province of Bangladesh. One half of the world’s giant freighters and super-tankers come to Chittagong to be dismantled, and over 20,000 workers are employed doing this.
Most of the workers are barefoot and few have any equipment. When a new ship comes in to the bay, workers walk through knee-deep mud at low tide and attach metal cables to winch the ship closer to shore.
Then the workers climb over 20,000- or 30,000-ton steel ships with blow torches, severing the tankers into giant pieces while children as younger than twelve run about doing tasks. The workers compete to work here because poverty is so extreme in Bangladesh, they will die if they don’t.
One worker the film followed, Belal, is nearly killed on camera when he was trapped under a massive piece of the ship being broken down. Later that night, after the workers praise Allah [god] for sparing his life, Belal laments his situation, longs for his family, and dreams of a different future. Another worker suggests that Allah chose them for this work, and this was their destiny. Later we find out Belal’s wife just gave birth to a baby girl who was blind, because Belal didn’t make enough money shipbreaking and his wife was malnourished throughout the pregnancy. He makes the three-day journey to his home village, and breaks down crying when he finally holds his beautiful, blind daughter.
This is a perfect film to teach about capitalism. We see how the racist bosses of the shipbreaking company, who provide Bangladesh with 84 percent of all the country’s domestic steel, also make huge profits auctioning off the toilets, wiring, and any consumer goods salvageable from the ships. We see pay day, when workers who are owed money are told simply the company can’t afford to pay them. When one worker complains, everyone is kicked out.
I was born and raised in Sénégal, West Africa, and even though the poverty there isn’t always as extreme, I felt what these workers were going through. When I was growing up, eleven or more of us would eat from the same plate of rice. My mother would shove food to the side for me because I wasn’t fast enough and tell me to hurry, so many other kids had to eat. Kids have to fight with the cats who are hungry, too. As a teenager I immigrated to the U.S. for a better life and being an immigrant here has not been easy. In Bangladesh, many children simply do not eat. Immigrating is a distant dream.
As shocking as it was, the documentary also shows how invincible the spirit of these workers is. Through the worst conditions, we see workers joking and laughing, tenderly lying with their wives and husbands, sharing joy and despair, kissing away each other’s tears. Not one person in the audience had dry eyes by the end. And so it is also a perfect film to teach about the working class. Iron Crows is also about our strength. When we organize that, we will win.
★ ★ ★ ★

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?
★ ★ ★ ★

Letters of July 15

A Mass Party Will Come from the Mass Movement
We participate in the mass organizations in order to fight for the political leadership of the working class and build a mass PLP. Reading and distributing CHALLENGE is central to our work. As we participate in fightbacks and reform campaigns in mass organizations, CHALLENGE gives us the opportunity to introduce communist politics and analysis to friends in our base at work, in schools, communities, and churches.
Our club is active in an immigrant rights group that is funded by the “liberal” ruling class and involved in various struggles, like a $15-an-hour minimum wage, housing issues and budget cuts. Within this, our club fights racism and for multiracial international unity of the working class. Over the past 10 years, we have grown to a club of 12 recruiting our five newest members after the rebellion in Ferguson against racist police terror.
We read CHALLENGE articles in our club meetings and study groups. We struggle with veteran and new members to distribute CHALLENGE hand to hand and through networks of readers and distributors as the main way to take advantage of the political opportunities to build the Party.
Each member takes between four and up to 50 papers each issue, allowing the club to distribute 150 CHALLENGEs hand to hand and through networks of non-Party workers, who also distribute some papers. We also sell or distribute papers at mass protests. In all, we usually distribute 200 to 250 copies. There is still a lot of room for improvement.
This process often leads to profound political discussion and uncovers many questions or disagreements. We talk about the contradiction between being in reform struggles while exposing capitalism and fighting for communist revolution. Many times workers ask why communism has failed. One new member recently explained how he confronts his friends’ anti-communist ideas. We also expose the dead end of nationalist politics. As we build stronger ties with our friends, our members and  our Party become stronger.
Two new friends came to our last study group. We identify new friends in the mass organization by how workers respond to CHALLENGE and to what our comrades say in meetings and at protests. We continue to struggle with our comrades to take advantage of the opportunities that always arise as the work in the mass organization continues.
★ ★ ★ ★
Movie Review:
The Black Panthers
I went to see the new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution by veteran Black documentary film maker Stanley Nelson, who also made the film Freedom Summer about the 1964 summer civil rights struggle in Mississippi. His new film is a fascinating look at the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, celebrating the organization’s accomplishments while discussing some of the flaws that contributed to its demise.
The film will have a commercial release in numerous cities beginning in September, and then will be shown on PBS in February. It’s definitely worth watching.
It contains footage of BPP rallies and interviews with leaders and members, including Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois chapter who declared, “We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”
The film shows that while the top leaders of the BPP were men (including Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale), the majority of members were women. The public face of the BPP was mostly men, often in militant face-offs with the police, while it was women who quietly staffed the offices and ran the community breakfast and health clinic programs. Despite the importance of women, and despite capable women leaders like Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins and Kathleen Cleaver, sexism was widespread in the BPP.
Nelson also reveals that a majority of the BPP members were teenagers, radicalized by the violent repression suffered by Black people. The BPP rejected non-violence and advocated armed self-defense of Black communities from racist police brutality. This was welcomed by millions at a time when people were fighting back all over the world, from Vietnam to Latin America.
The BPP advocated revolution — destroying capitalism — while at the same time demanding improvements in the lives of Black workers, including jobs, better housing, schools and health care, exemption from the imperialist military draft, and the end to police harassment and brutality. This was encapsulated in the BPP’s 1966 Ten Point Program. Many thought the BPP had a bright future.
Yet it was not to be. Formed in 1966, the Panthers were essentially defunct by 1971, when they suffered a major split between factions based around Cleaver in Algeria (who advocated adventurist attacks on police that ended up getting members killed) and around Newton and David Hilliard (who favored focusing on the breakfast program and health clinics). There was also a move toward reformist electoral politics, with Bobby Seale running unsuccessfully for Mayor of Oakland in 1972. BPP chapters all around the country were closed down so that people could come to Oakland to help with the campaign.
One of the weaknesses of the BPP was that it seriously underestimated the power of the repressive state apparatus to attack and tear apart the organization. Under J. Edgar Hoover and Cointelpro, the FBI coordinated with local police forces to infiltrate the BPP with dozens of informants, to disrupt the BPP (by encouraging splits and personal attacks) and to murder members with armed attacks on its offices. One such brutal police assault killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago.
Another flaw was the cult worship of leaders like Huey Newton, who was addicted to cocaine, living in a penthouse apartment and often abusive to members. Eldridge Cleaver was a blatant sexist, who advocated risky small-group violence while living safely abroad. He would go on to become a “born-again” Christian and support Ronald Reagan, while being financially supported by right-wing groups.
A major weakness of the BPP was its unwillingness to focus on the Black working class and organize in factories, where a tremendous amount of anti-racist struggle was going on at the time, especially in the auto plants. Huey Newton and other leaders argued that the truly revolutionary class was not workers but rather the “lumpenproletariat,” largely composed of people who made their living from criminal activity, including drugs and prostitution. If the BPP had focused its energies on building a base in the working class, as well as joining mass organizations like unions and churches, it might have endured state repression and not fallen apart.
The Black Panthers is an important film to watch and discuss with our friends, to learn the lessons — both positive and negative — of an organization that attracted thousands of young men and women who dedicated years of their lives to fighting against a destructive racist system and for a better society.
★ ★ ★ ★
What You Do Counts
In letter “Struggle and Learn” in CHALLENGE (6/17), I liked the lines, “We should constantly raise the line and struggle with people. It may seem like we’re not getting anywhere, but we can never tell.” It reminded me of a passage in a book I’m reading, which I would like to share.
 The book is Heinz Rein’s 1948 novel Finale Berlin which tells the story of an underground, communist-led German Resistance group during the last two weeks of World War II. After 12 years of clandestine struggle, the group succeeds in liberating a Berlin neighborhood as the Red Army approaches. One character says:
Up to now, we’ve performed our illegal work without any visible success, we’ve always only been able slightly to touch the people to whom we turned with our secret radio transmitter, our words have always dribbled into the darkness, have been vaporized into a great desert, our leaflets have continually fluttered into nothingness, we’ve never been able to observe their effect because we had to get away from the people who received them before they had unfolded them, our acts of sabotage often seemed ridiculously small to us, as if a mosquito was attacking an elephant, we’ve always remained without an echo, and in the final analysis it was only thanks to a belief in ourselves that we didn’t despair at the wall of silence which all of us ran up against. But finally, yesterday evening, something really happened, there was a visible success, a many-voiced echo boomed back to us, there our activity, with which perhaps we only vindicated ourselves to ourselves, was transformed into a real deed for the first time.
This dramatic example of events 70 years ago can inspire us never to despair. Finale Berlin was republished in Germany this year. As far as I know, it’s never been translated into English or Spanish, but I recommend it to everyone who can read German. (Be forewarned that, as the excerpt shows, they liked to write very long sentences in the 1940s.)
★ ★ ★ ★