The massive demonstrations over the racist police murder of George Floyd have some of the corporate political establishment scrambling to find footing on a changed political landscape. Even as the Trump administration doubles down with its white supremacist response to the protests, and cops continue brutalizing protesters, a range of political entities from city councils to the Supreme Court are making some big decisions that suddenly tilt in favor of oppressed people and workers.

An old saying goes “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The movement for Black Lives has pushed back hard against racist, brutal cops and structural racism. Even more than that, it has won victories — even if partial or temporary — for other important struggles of the working class.

Statues of confederate leaders, racist Philadelphia Police Chief and Mayor Frank Rizzo, Christopher Columbus and others who waged genocide against Indigenous peoples are falling like dominoes. The Mississippi flag that contained the confederate battle flag within its design has been ditched. There is even talk of monuments to the slaveholding “founding fathers” being done away with.

Budgets of some police departments are being cut and the funding moved to social services and people’s needs. The Minneapolis City Council voted to dismantle the police department and replace it with “a new model of public safety,” according to the council president. Police are being removed from public schools in Oakland, Calif., and police budgets cut in other cities. On Juneteenth, Colorado passed a police-reform bill that barred “qualified immunity,” the doctrine passed by the Supreme Court in 1967 that grants cops immunity from civil suits.

In another very clear sign of the strength of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been a shift by right-wing U.S. Supreme Court judges on three important decisions in a matter of weeks.

The Democratic Party has leaned on the heavily trafficked notion that voting for the lesser of two evils in a presidential campaign is essential to keep a Republican president from packing the Supreme Court. If Republicans win, we’re supposed to focus on the next election and if a lesser-evil Democrat wins, we’re supposed to give them a chance to get things done instead of organizing in the streets. 

But capitalism concentrates money and power into the hands of bigger and fewer corporations and banks all the time. As this process has unfolded, reactionary courts and liberal courts alike have doled out plenty of setbacks to workers and to people fighting against special oppressions. While every form of struggle — even the electoral arena — is important, what this new period has demonstrated is that a united working class can move mountains in the struggle.

Trump’s appointment of two right-wing justices — Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — sent shudders of fear up the spine of many well-intentioned activists. Reactionaries may have felt that the so-called liberal members of the court were safely outnumbered and the possibility for any progressive decisions had been headed off. But after millions participated in militant and sustained demonstrations against police murders and systemic racism in May and June, three decisions have Trump and his reactionary ilk spitting bullets.

On June 15, the court ruled that LGBTQ2S workers cannot be fired for who they are. The 1964 Civil Rights law protects them. Until this interpretation of the law, incredibly, there was nothing preventing bosses from firing people based on their gender identity or sexuality. Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6 to 3 ruling, and Chief Justice Roberts voted in favor.

Three days after the civil rights victory for LGBTQ2S workers, the court struck down Trump’s plan to dismantle DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], the program protecting undocumented workers who came to the U.S. as children. The decision — although still temporary — was a great relief to some 650,000 “dreamers” who otherwise would have been thrown out of the country. That 5 to 4 decision was written by Chief Justice Roberts.

Then on June 29, the court turned back a Louisiana anti-abortion law that would have destroyed women’s right to choose and left the state with just one abortion clinic. The case was widely seen as pivotal to the right-wing goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. Again, Roberts sided with the “liberal wing” even though he voted the other way on an identical law in Texas in 2016.

Gorsuch is a known right-winger, and although Chief Justice Roberts was considered a “swing vote” by many, an October 2019 opinion piece in the New York Times characterized him correctly: “In all 42 split-decision cases that the chief justice has presided over involving racial minorities, immigrants, workers and abortion, he voted for conservative outcomes 100 percent of the time.” After last week’s Louisiana decision, a Times article by Adam Liptak expresses surprise: “While he has on occasion disappointed his usual conservative allies … nothing in his 15-year tenure on the court compares to the recent run of liberal votes in major cases.”

The Supreme Court is the least democratic of the three branches of government. Nine judges, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, never elected, for life, can overrule Congress and the president. Of course they seem omnipotent in the absence of a powerful movement. But the explosion of anger over the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd proved to be too much power to be ignored. No doubt there will be some setbacks in the struggle for more victories. But there is a new level of solidarity, unity and determination in the fight against racist police terror.

All out to defend and support Black Lives Matter! Jail killer cops! Abolish the police!

Every evening for the past two-and-a-half months, the people of Cuba have come out on their streets and porches to applaud and cheer for the 3,000 members of the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade who are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic on the front lines in 28 countries with 34 brigades. For the Cuban people, these medical professionals are not just doctors going abroad, but representatives of a society where health and human life are considered an absolute priority.

After two-and-a-half months, the first brigade that had been in Lombardy, Italy, returned home and was met at the airport by President Miguel Díaz-Canel via a video conference. He told them: “With your noble gesture and your brave disposition to defy death to save lives, you have shown the world a truth that Cuba’s enemies have tried to silence or misrepresent: the strength of Cuban medicine! You represent the victory of life over death, of solidarity over selfishness.”

In the last 55 years, 600,000 Cubans have provided medical services in 160 countries. And that entire time, the U.S. State Department has done everything in its array of dirty tactics to discredit them and undermine their purpose of administering health to poor people, most especially in Latin America. This included the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program (CMPP) from 2009 to 2017, whose whole reason to exist was to lure Cuban doctors away from their mission with promises of passage to the U.S., where there would be green cards and lucrative jobs waiting. 

It never stops. Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — the agency that provides funds for subversion programs against Cuba — allocated $3 million specifically for projects directed against the medical brigades abroad.

The example of Cuba’s model of health care for all and sharing that view with the world sends the U.S. and the champions of neoliberalism into some kind of frenzy. It is the antithesis of the U.S. model of health that excludes millions and sends others into bankruptcy to pay doctor and hospital bills. Imagine a model like that minus the parasitic insurance corporations and pharmaceutical giants who want to control all medicine and legally sell it at any price they wish.  

It is no wonder they will stoop to any depth to smash the prestige that Cuba maintains with the world. Can anyone think of just one sustained humanitarian mission made by the U.S. that did not have strings attached?

The Trump administration did not start this attack, but has escalated it by sweeping sanctions that now include an end of all remittances from Cuban Americans to their families on the island. Over and over, Trump has denounced Cuba’s medical brigades as constituting forced labor, ignoring the fact that in Cuba they have many more volunteers to go on these missions than positions to be filled, and that the biggest heroes to the Cuban people are their doctors.

As Cuba’s example shines, the anti-Cuba crowd acts more desperate. Florida’s lead anti-Cuba senator, Rick Scott, called for more punishment for Cuba’s “human trafficking” by sanctioning any country that participates in Cuba’s Medical Mission Program.

This period of crisis offers a great possibility for international cooperation between nations when it comes to medical assistance, as illustrated by the Cuban COVID-19 brigades. One of the criticisms from detractors of the program is that Cuba is receiving billions of dollars in revenue while only paying a fraction of that to the medical professionals. It is hard for some to look outside of the prism of capitalist relations because they can only see the medical industry in terms of profit to be made. 

Why is it a crime that blockaded Cuba makes mutually beneficial agreements with countries that can pay for its services? The mindset of these brigadistas is quite the opposite of being oppressed, because they are fully aware that their contribution helps ensure that the payments contribute towards the entire Cuban population being afforded universal health care.  And in practically all the countries the patients receiving the care of the Cuban doctors pay nothing.  Their accommodations are not luxurious like that afforded to many doctors; they live with just the basics, because these are emergency missions in the pandemic focused on saving people’s lives.

In many countries, including Argentina, where there is no Cuban medical brigade, unemployed doctors and professional medical associations have expressed varying levels of opposition. But this doesn’t easily equate because one aspect of the Henry Reeve Medical Brigades, which were developed in 2005, is that they are specialized and trained to hit the ground running to work in emergency triage situations, like natural disasters and quick-moving viruses. They come as a team made up of family physicians, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, health technology engineers and biotechnology experts, and many have the experience of being on previous international missions. 

The Cuban brigades are not the long-term solution to the shortcomings in a country’s health care system, but rather a stop-gap solution to an immediate need, as in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, where they provided care for 40 percent of the victims, or in Western Africa in 2014 after the Ebola outbreak. Once again, it was Cuban doctors leading the fight with over 600 medical professionals, while Western governments watched. In 2015, a Henry Reeve Brigade went to Nepal after the earthquake there and treated 4,600 patients — many of whom, as the doctors reported, had never heard of the country of Cuba before.

In the fight against COVID-19, each country makes its own contract, its own timetable and its own area of need with the Cuban Ministry of Health. Some pay, while others only cover the cost of transportation and accommodations in their countries. The basis of these agreements is not about commercial transactions but rather cooperation, and importantly, every country that has applied to Cuba for a medical brigade during this pandemic has gotten one.

In the conclusion of his remarks to the returning medical team, Díaz-Canel said: “Witnessing the growing world clamor for our brigades to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize has filled us with healthy pride these days. With the mission you have completed, you have made a solid contribution to advancing this movement.”

Díaz-Canel was referring to a blooming international campaign to nominate the Cuban medical brigades for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, which will be officially launched in the U.S. on June 16 in a webinar with actor Danny Glover and Cuban Ambassador to the U.S. José Ramón Cabañas. To sign on to the campaign, go to www.cubanobel.org.

Source: Resumen

This article first appeared Jan. 29, 1971, headlined “The year of the pig: Should workers support police strikes?” On the Chinese calendar, 1971 was a Year of the Pig.

Are strikes by the police to be regarded approximately the same way as strikes by ordinary workers? A reading of the treatment accorded to the New York police strike by the Daily World (the paper of the Communist Party which professes to be Marxist-Leninist) clearly conveys this impression. A column by George Morris, the Daily World’s labor analyst, waxes eloquent about the cops’ strike and says “it is in the spirit of rebellion we see everywhere today as in unions against the long entrenched bureaucracy.” He further says that the cops are “beginning to see themselves as in much the same position as other city employees and workers.” Finally, he admonishes his readers that “fire should not be blunderbussed against all on the police force.”

You see, the way to look at it is that there are good cops and bad cops, just like there are good capitalists and bad ones. We must assume then, that there are good storm troopers and bad ones if we use the logic of George Morris. In this way, Morris substitutes bourgeois morality for Marxist analysis of class antagonisms and contradictions between class groupings.

The cops’ strike is not an isolated phenomenon. There is one in progress right now in Milwaukee. Earlier there were strikes or stoppages in Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio. Strike preparations are underway in perhaps a dozen other cities throughout the country. It is therefore necessary and in the vital interests of the working class to restate the fundamental position of revolutionary Marxism on this crucial question. Should strikes of cops be treated on an equal level with workers’ strikes?

Emphatically, no! A striking worker and a striking police officer may on the surface appear to have the same immediate aims — to get higher pay and better conditions for themselves. But this is to take an extremely narrow and superficial view of their apparently similar situations. The truth, however, is that there is objectively speaking not a shred of class identity between workers and the police. The fundamental interests of the workers are diametrically opposed to those of the police and are absolutely irreconcilable with them.

Producers or parasites?

A worker is, above all, a producer. The police officer is a parasite who lives off what the worker produces. No truer words could be said! All the material wealth which is now in the possession of the capitalist class was produced by the workers. When a worker goes out on strike she [or he] is merely trying to retrieve a portion of the wealth which her [or his] labor power produced. The worker gets back in the form of wages only a portion of what he [or she] produces. The rest is what the capitalist class retains in the form of profit (really the unpaid labor of the workers).

The gross national income of the U.S. last year reached the astronomical sum of one trillion dollars. It was all produced by workers: Black, Brown, white, men and women and even children. The struggles of all the workers, insofar as their immediate demands are concerned, are merely to retrieve a larger portion of this wealth which they produced for the bosses and which the bosses keep for themselves.

Contribute nothing to social wealth

What have the cops contributed to the production of this unprecedented amount of wealth? Nothing at all. In fact, their principal function is to guard the wealth for the capitalists, protect their monopolist profits from the demands of the workers. Even as the New York cops were out on strike, their emergency crews were busily clubbing the heads of striking telephone workers. That’s the very essence of a cop: to crack the heads of strikers and practice the most inhuman brutality against the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano/a communities.

A cop is a mercenary hired by the capitalist class through their agent (the city government) to keep the mass of the workers and the oppressed in complete subjection. They utilize all the forces and violence at their disposal whenever the masses rise up in rebellion against the unendurable conditions imposed by the master class.

The police are the most parasitic social grouping in society. When they work — if that’s what it can possibly be called — their labor is directed against the workers and oppressed. Graft, corruption, intimate collaboration with all sorts of underworld figures and enterprises such as gambling, narcotics and a thousand other shady businesses — that’s what cops are really engaged in.

They are utterly inseparable from crime and corruption itself. One could not exist without the other. Both are nourished and supported by the nature of the capitalist system itself. To put the police on a par with the workers is to erase the difference between the persecutors and their victims.

Such incidental operations of the police as traffic control and other related useful functions for society are deliberately tacked on by the government to police control when they in reality should be separate and independent activities of workers apart from the parasitic regular police functions.

What about German ‘Social Democrat’ cops?

The police in every capitalist country are trained in the spirit of civil war against the workers and the popular masses in general. This is so even in the rare cases, like pre-war Austria and Germany, where substantial sections of the police considered themselves “socialists” or “social democrats” because a large section of the populations of these countries were either socialists or communists.

However, at the critical moment when Hitler made ready to seize power by a fascist coup, the police unanimously and cheerfully lined up with him and opened up a civil war against the workers of Austria. In Germany proper, they joined the storm troopers. They played a prime role in Hitler’s attempt to ferret out every militant worker and every progressive person and haul them off to the concentration camps. These same police systematically carried out the torture of hundreds of thousands of socialists and communists, not to speak of the unbelievable atrocities against the Jews.

In this country, who does not know that the Klan and the John Birch Society are the most intimate collaborators with the police and in some cities actually control the police?

Who does not know that almost all the strike-breaking agencies in the country work hand in glove with the police? Both are in the service of the industrialists as soon as the workers make an independent move of their own.

Army of occupation in oppressed communities

In the Black and Brown communities, the police play the role of a foreign occupation army and practice a form of cruelty and brutality which differs only in degree from the U.S. occupation army in Vietnam and Cambodia. As a token of the high esteem and affection in which these communities hold the police, they have coined the word “pig” as synonym for cop and this word has passed into the universal language of the oppressed.

It is utterly false to compare the rebellion of the cops with that of the workers and oppressed people, as does Daily World columnist George Morris. Only one who has renounced Marxism would do that.

The police strikes, if they can be called that, are in the nature of pro-slavery rebellions whose ultimate effect is to strengthen the capitalist state against the masses everywhere. A victory for the cops means extra privileges for these parasites. This will embolden them and encourage them in the use of violence in future struggles against the workers. Every cent paid to the police comes out of the hides of the workers. Every cent they get is at the expense of welfare, housing, schools, and other facilities and services that are needed by the people. And the police are now the biggest item in New York City’s budget!

Unlike workers, when police go out on strike they are not trying to retrieve money withheld from them for useful work done on behalf of society. Their services are solely and exclusively in the interests of one class of society only: the ruling class. Clarity on this point is absolutely indispensable. If the police find themselves in a controversy with the ruling class over the amount of money they should get as mercenaries, the workers should treat this as an internal struggle in the camp of the enemy and not confuse it with a struggle of their own class.

But that’s exactly what George Morris does! His article is an affront to every worker who has ever felt the brunt of a police club.

The Boston police strike of 1919

Of course, there are exceptional cases where police strikers, in a struggle with the capitalist state, have no alternative but to turn for support to the workers. These cases are rare indeed, such as the Boston police strike of 1919, which Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, broke. In such cases it is the duty of the workers’ leaders to adroitly intervene in the struggle.

In doing so, they must make clear that their intervention is not motivated by any class solidarity with the police (who on the morrow of their victory will again proceed to club the heads of striking workers) but out of motives of working-class expedience — that is, to help the police undermine the capitalist state structure. The longer a police strike lasts, the more it undermines capitalist law and order. In that task, a revolutionary worker should help, while helping even more to build workers’ self-defense groups.

The various parasitic elements which constitute the capitalist state are always in conflict with each other on how to divide among themselves the juiciest portions of the city, state and federal treasuries. Like thieves, they are invariably at each other’s throats, each seeking a greater share of the loot. These parasitic elements comprise the police, detectives, prison officials, executioners, various state and local anti-subversive squads, and the judicial bureaucracies. These are not to be compared to firefighters, sanitation workers or other workers who have been co-opted by the government into the capitalist state apparatus so as to keep their wages in check. These workers perform useful tasks and will continue to do so even in the highest form of socialist society. Morris deliberately confuses the issue when he compares police to workers.

Will there be cops when classes are gone?

One way for a Marxist to judge whether a specific social group in the present capitalist state setup is parasitic or really performs socially necessary and useful work is to ask whether such groupings would be needed in a socialist system after the abolition of all class rule. Clearly police will not be needed. With the abolition and disappearance of all vestiges of class privilege, the need for a coercive special force, even a workers’ militia, becomes superfluous.

However, men and women who work to make a more sanitary social environment and make it free from all sorts of hazards, such as fire, will of course be needed. If even in a socialist society the need for a coercive force such as police continually diminishes as the socialist system develops to a higher and higher form, then all the less do we need police in a capitalist society. Here its fundamental function is to suppress the working class and in particular use the most brutal violence against the Black, Chicano/a and Puerto Rican people.

It is to be noted that the current wave of police insurgency comes after a considerable period when they have been engaged in actual civil war against the Black and Brown communities. The ruling class has felt itself more and more indebted to the police precisely because of this. Having been highly flattered for their brutal role in the recent period, the police are now demanding extra privileges and remuneration for their storm trooper role in those communities and on the college campuses as well as in the recent strike struggles throughout the whole country.

The police have also become more vociferous in denouncing the so-called lenient judges and demanding that the government “take the handcuffs off the police.” This cry is nothing but a fascist demand for the right to unrestricted use of force and violence against the civil population. It is in this context that we must view the police strikes as well as the general historical role that they play in the class struggle.

Paris Commune dispelled cops — and crime

That the working class needs no capitalist police to secure and defend them was never more clearly demonstrated than in the first great proletarian revolution more than a hundred years ago — during the Paris Commune. Scarcely had the Paris Commune been established (the first truly working class government had just begun to survey the tasks ahead of it) when the world had its first vision since the dawn of class society of what would happen to the entire capitalist police establishment on the day of the proletarian revolution.

“No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies,” says Karl Marx about the Paris Commune in his celebrated book, “The Civil War in France.”

“In fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848,” he remarks, “the streets of Paris were safe and without police of any kind.”

Is there a capitalist government anywhere in the world that can make such a boast even for one day? Is there any large city anywhere in the capitalist world which is free even for a single day of any crime and could do without any police of any kind as was the case with the Paris Commune? Merely to ask the question is to answer it. To put an end to crime it is first of all necessary to put an end to the thoroughly criminal rule of the bourgeoisie. It is their very existence which breeds not only crime and corruption but virulent racism, imperialist war and genocide.

To infuse the working class with a revolutionary attitude toward the police is at the same time ideological preparation for the overthrow of the capitalist class.

Sen. Tom Cotton wants to stop Chinese college students from studying science in the United States. The Arkansas statesman told Fox News on April 26 that “if Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing.” 

William Shakespeare? Wasn’t he that English feller? It’s doubtful that Tom Cotton knows that Shakespeare was Karl Marx’s favorite playwright and that his works are regularly performed in the People’s Republic of China.

One of the most famous Shakespearean actors was Paul Robeson. The Black liberation activist, who defended both the Soviet Union and socialist China, gave a magnificent performance as Othello. 

It doesn’t occur to Tom Cotton that Chinese students attending U.S. universities might want to study African American authors like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker or Richard Wright.

Cotton’s remarks are on the same level as the Texas governor who vetoed an appropriation by the state legislature during World War I. The $1,000 was to teach National Guard officers some French.

The governor supposedly declared that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was good enough for the boys of Texas. While the Arkansas senator’s words are just as ludicrous, they’re also dangerously racist.

Is Cotton proposing to “stand in front of the schoolhouse door,” as the segregationist Gov. George Wallace did in 1963, when Wallace tried to stop Black students from entering the University of Alabama?

Tom Cotton is walking in the footsteps of Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, who tried to prevent the “Little Rock Nine” from attending the city’s Central High School in 1957. Does the senator want to stop Chinese students from studying scientific subjects like Faubus tried to block Black students? 

Civil rights laws against discrimination were written to stop what Tom Cotton is proposing. So does the 14th Amendment, which was written in the blood of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and white soldiers in the Union Army. 

‘A covenant with death’

What about studying the Federalist Papers? This collection of 85 essays pushed for ratifying the U.S. Constitution. They were written by a trio of white supremacists: James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. 

Madison owned over 100 enslaved Africans in 1801, according to the White House Historical Association. Jay owned at least 18 Africans at one time or another, as per the New York Slavery Records index. Hamilton handled sales transactions of enslaved Africans for his in-laws ― the wealthy Schuyler family ― as well as for the Continental Army.

The U.S. Constitution was written by rich people to protect their property, the largest part of which In 1788 was ownership of Black human beings. 

Article 1, section 2, part 3 of the Constitution counted Black people as three-fifths of whites while Indigenous people “not taxed” weren’t counted at all. Section 9, part 1 of the same article prevented Congress from ending the African slave trade for 20 years.

So even if it wanted to, for two decades Congress couldn’t outlaw the genocidal commerce that included throwing African children to the sharks. After 1808, the slave trade continued within the United States.

No wonder the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the U.S. Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

Democracy for the rich

Chinese students should learn the real history of the United States. More Chinese workers probably know that May Day was given to the world by the workers of Chicago in 1886 than do workers in the United States. That’s because U.S. capitalists suppress learning that history.

Key to the United States becoming the world’s wealthiest country was the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the theft of their land and the enslavement of millions of Africans.

Cotton picked by enslaved Africans accounted for half of U.S. exports in 1860. Wall Street grew up as the partner of the Southern slave masters.

Instead of the Federalist Papers, the  Chinese students and workers should study “Black Reconstruction in America” by W.E.B. Du Bois. This classic describes and defends the most democratic period in U.S. history that followed the Civil War.

Public school systems were started by Reconstruction governments that had both Black and white officials. Du Bois, who was a co-founder of the NAACP and editor of its magazine, “The Crisis,” joined the Communist Party when he was 93 years old.

Thousands of Black people were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during and after Reconstruction’s bloody overthrow. Mark Twain designed a flag with skulls and crossbones for what he called the “United States of Lyncherdom.”

Many Latinx, Indigenous and Chinese people were also murdered. Two years after Chinese workers built the first U.S. transcontinental railroad across the Sierra Nevada mountains, 19 Chinese people were lynched in Los Angeles in 1871. The U.S. Army massacred over 300 members of the Lakota Sioux Nation at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Arkansas is a good example of U.S. “democracy.” Usually ranked as the second poorest state, Arkansas is home to the Walton family ― owners of Walmart ― whose collective fortune is $190 billion. Tom Cotton is their stooge in the Senate.

The Walton family stash is $57 billion more than the gross domestic product of 3 million people in Arkansas. The Waltons are so rich because 1.5 million Walmart workers in the United States and 700,000 Walmart workers in other countries are so poor.

Working and poor people in Arkansas have tried to fight back. When African Americans in Elaine, Ark., formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union in 1919, they were hunted down and massacred. Hundreds of Black people were murdered. 

The anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells wrote about this tragedy in “The Elaine Massacre.” Tom Cotton should read it.

‘They don’t need to learn’  

There’s a long history behind Sen. Cotton saying that Chinese students “don’t need to learn” scientific subjects. Slave masters didn’t think enslaved Africans needed to learn how to read and write.

Slave owners thought it was as dangerous as handing out rifles on the plantation. A North Carolina law stipulated 39 lashes on the back of any enslaved African who was found teaching another enslaved person to read and write. 

The British colonial rulers in Kenya declared in their 1949 Beecher report that “illiterates with the right attitude to manual employment are preferable to products of the schools who are not readily disposed to enter manual employment.” (“How Europe Undeveloped Africa,” by Walter Rodney)

Sen. Cotton is claiming that Chinese students are coming to U.S. universities to steal secrets. What secrets? 

The compass? Gunpowder? Paper making? Printing? These famous Chinese inventions were shared with the rest of the world. The People’s Republic of China has sent cosmonauts into outer space.

Chinese students don’t have to come to the United States to spend $11.4 billion in tuition in 2015.  China had 4.7 million science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates in 2016 while the United States had 568,000. Knowledge is knowable.

Scientific cooperation is needed more than ever to fight the coronavirus. The People’s Republic of China gave the U.S. a precious window to fight the virus which the Trump regime and its capitalist medical-industrial-complex squandered.

Sen. Tom Cotton needs to go back to school and stop using the racist term “China virus.”

The campaign of slander against China to deflect criticism of President Trump over the COVID-19 pandemic has ratcheted up in recent days. 

It isn’t only a defensive move by the Trump administration itself. A leaked memo by GOP strategists urged Republican senatorial candidates to attack China instead of attempting to defend Trump during their election campaigns. 

Trump himself is pushing the phony lab story — that the virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. Until recently, he was even raising the possibility that the virus was created purposely as a bioweapon. On May 1, he seemed to back off the bioweapon claim but is clinging to the story that the virus “escaped” the Wuhan lab in an accident. 

Trump is also hammering away on the notion that China delayed reports of casualties from the virus, thereby setting up the rest of the world for a pandemic. For his part, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also pushed the lab claim, and has also leveled charges that China downplayed the severity of the disease in January in order to hoard medical supplies and equipment. 

The U.S. states of Missouri and Mississippi are suing China. Right-wingers like former Trump aide Steve Bannon, Sens. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and others are all trafficking in China bashing. 

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as more absurd bluster by Trump and his right-wing sycophants, but presumed Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden says that Trump has failed to hold China accountable and that he would be even tougher on China, were he to win the election.

According to the April 30 New York Times, so-called “China hawks” in the administration pushed so hard for U.S. spy agencies to say there was evidence to support the lab theory, that there was disgruntlement, with a former CIA official even accusing the administration of “conclusion shopping.” That resistance may have been a reflection of how much is at stake in China for U.S. companies that make billions doing business there. A subsequent report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicated that although they see no evidence to support the bioweapon theory, they will continue “investigating” the possibility that the virus “escaped” the Wuhan lab by accident.

Scientists are tired of explaining

The lab theory has been refuted by scientists, including the Federation of American Scientists and the World Health Organization (WHO). Both disagree that the virus could have originated from a laboratory — not by design, nor by accident. An April 20th sciencealert.com article called “Scientists Are Tired of Explaining Why The COVID-19 Virus Was Not Made in a Lab” quotes Kristian Andersen, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research Institute: “By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes. One strong indicator that the new coronavirus evolved naturally, are flaws in the protein it uses to bind to human cells — deficiencies that someone trying to engineer a killer virus would have almost certainly avoided.”

Vox reported that Peter Daszak, a U.S. scientist who has studied coronaviruses and bats (the animal host) with colleagues in China, and at times in the lab in question, says that there was never a sample of the novel coronavirus at the Wuhan laboratory, only samples of similar coronaviruses. The genetic differences between those samples and the COVID-19 virus are significant. 

Even though they are in the same family of viruses, it would take decades of mutations for any of those samples to match the virus that has caused COVID-19. Daszak said, “No one had SARS-CoV-2 in culture. All of the hypotheses [of lab release] depend on them having it in culture or having bats in a lab. No one’s got bats in a lab, it’s absolutely unnecessary and very difficult to do.” The funding from the National Institute of Health that enabled Daszak’s collaborative work with China was cut off on April 23.

The claim being pushed by Pompeo is that China underreported cases and deaths in January, and didn’t disclose that there was human-to-human transmission. This, the line goes, was so that other countries wouldn’t grasp the potential spread of the disease, and then China could stealthily stockpile and hoard medical equipment and supplies through regular trade. The accusation is sickening, given the level of cooperation and aid to other countries that China has exhibited, even after gaining control in the battle against the virus at home.

Chinese doctors first reported the outbreak to the WHO on Jan. 1. All they knew at the time was that there was a cluster of cases of pneumonia. The WHO issued an online guidance on Jan. 10 that said, “Based on experience with SARS and MERS … recommending droplet and contact precautions when caring for patients, and airborne precautions for aerosol generating procedures conducted by health workers.”

For scientists, medical professionals and government officials, that is a clear warning about contagion. The WHO, along with the most prestigious medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet have all published about COVID-19 and closely watched the casualty statistics. None have reported any suspicion that China was underreporting at any time.

It is with heartfelt sympathy that we send our condolences on the passing of Father Lawrence Lucas, one of the founders of the December 12th Movement. Father Lucas has such a rich and powerful history of activism in New York City and surrounding areas as he helped lead the fight for liberation of our Black and Latinx sisters and brothers who continue to suffer the injustices of the racist politicians and the state apparatus. 

While he was ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church, his voice and actions took a different direction than most. For over 50 years, he pushed forward without apology, never afraid to rock any boat as he spoke truth to power, as he took on the racist power structure for decade after decade.

Additionally, he was a strong defender of Zimbabwe’s right to its own self-determination, free of interference from the United States and its European allies in their continuing quest to control the peoples of Africa, her land and her resources. 

We shall all strive to carry on his tremendous legacy.

In solidarity,

Members of the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper

On April 8, Sen. Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign. More recently, in a move that was widely expected, Sanders endorsed Joe Biden as the presumed Democratic nominee. While this moment is very painful for Sanders’ campaign supporters, it’s important to examine the larger developments to determine which way the movement should go next.

Let’s recognize the Sanders campaign, not for what didn’t happen, but for what it did accomplish. It was unprecedented in bringing the issues of health care and education as human rights into the mainstream; and it began to open the discussion on socialism. It tackled issues like mass incarceration and the climate crisis. It energized a large, multinational, working-class movement of mostly young people who are fed up with the status quo. 

No one should forget that the Democratic Party establishment connived, conspired and worked overtime to undermine the Sanders campaign, along with the big business media and every conceivable mouthpiece for the bankers and capitalists. The idea that workers are entitled to even the most basic rights like health care, food, a job, a home or even the right to live was considered heretical.  

What these agents for the billionaires and bankers feared was not so much Sanders the candidate, but rather the campaign’s potential for raising working-class expectations — expectations that could have gone beyond the narrow confines of the electoral arena.  

Several months ago, we took the position of critically supporting the Sanders campaign, not based on the candidate, with whom we certainly have differences, especially on imperialist foreign policy, but based on supporting the working-class movement, especially younger workers, whose aspirations found expression in this electoral arena.  

The question is: what’s the next step?

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” These words, attributed to V.I. Lenin, the architect of the Russian Revolution, aptly describe the upheaval the world is experiencing during the coronavirus pandemic, the changes that have already taken place and those that are still to come. 

The capitalist economic downturn, precipitated by the overproduction of oil and gas, percolating prior to the coronavirus pandemic, is now in full swing. It is a crisis that is global in character, and when the coronavirus pandemic eases, it will be all the more apparent.

Over 22 million people in the U.S. are newly unemployed. The inability of capitalism to provide even the most basic measures for public health has been exposed to the entire world. In the so-called richest country in the world, health care workers are not provided personal protective equipment (PPE). Testing kits are few and far between.  

It is the unplanned anarchy of the so-called free market as much as any government policy that is overwhelmingly responsible for the lack of necessary equipment.  It was the closing of hospitals because they were considered insufficiently profitable that has resulted in doctors and nurses having to make unthinkable choices as beds and ventilators run out.   

The staggeringly disproportionate rate of deaths and the resultant suffering in Black, Brown and other oppressed communities has shown once again the brutal, white supremacist nature of capitalism. Millions of poor and oppressed people locked in prisons and detention camps are facing a virtual death sentence.

Hunger is sweeping the country. In both cities and rural areas, it is becoming increasingly hard for people to afford or obtain food. On April 9, some 10,000 families in San Antonio, Texas, lined up for food.

Revolutionary socialists have found themselves in a completely changed situation, dealing with stay-at-home orders that prevent mass demonstrations, but at the same time rising working-class consciousness and anger at capitalist failures.  

It has also changed the electoral arena in a way that weighed against the Sanders campaign, and perhaps most electoral campaigns, at least for now.  It is hard and perhaps foolhardy to predict what this will mean for November’s election.

This was fully demonstrated in Wisconsin’s April 7 primary, when voters were forced to go to the polls, risking health and safety. In a brutally cynical move, in-person elections in Wisconsin were ordered to go ahead. In Milwaukee, which has the state’s largest population of Black and Latinx people, only five polling sites out of 180 were open.  

Exploiting fear and instability

The Democratic Party has been conducting a campaign to exploit fear, fostering the slogan of “return to normalcy” and fueling the argument that Sanders was unelectable and too radical. Its message is aimed at suffocating the entire workers’ movement.   

Younger activists have roundly rejected this. In a #YouthVote Letter to Joe Biden penned by a number of groups, including the Sunrise Movement, the signers explained that normalcy meant going back to “endless war, skyrocketing inequality, crushing student loan debt, mass deportations, police murders of Black Americans and mass incarceration.”

If there is one urgent message to the movement at this juncture, it is this: not to be squelched, muffled or herded into the Biden campaign — a path that is as deadly as the virus.  

If the movement  disbands or follows the Democratic Party establishment, it will become disarmed in the face of bigger crises that cannot be addressed or resolved by the capitalist electoral parties.  

Recent events in Lansing, Mich., and other state capitals illustrate the dangerous side of the equation. Hundreds of rowdy, right-wing extremists, waving flags (including the confederate flag of slavery), toting guns and posturing for Donald Trump, marched on the Michigan Capitol calling for an end to stay-at-home orders. Similar protests took place in Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia, and more are planned.

There is a deeply racist and anti-working class character to these protests that should not be ignored. The fact that Michigan is home to Detroit, a majority Black city which has suffered a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths, should not be lost on anyone. 

It will take a vibrant, independent and militant working-class movement to answer the right-wing threat; and more importantly, to take us in a brand new direction if we are to save not only ourselves but the planet.  

Sanders’ role as the head of this movement has reached an impasse. The next step calls for shifting the struggle away from the Democratic Party straightjacket and fighting for working-class power.

We should remind ourselves how deeply undemocratic the U.S. electoral system is. In other countries, even capitalist ones, the Sanders movement would have had proportional representation.  

There are millions of people who cannot even vote, including immigrant workers — documented and undocumented — whose superexploited labor supersizes capitalist profits. Black, Brown and poor prisoners populating the ever-growing, for-profit, prison-industrial complex are stripped of voting rights. Add the overpowering influence of billionaires and fraud aimed at depriving the oppressed of their voting rights, and you get a system that is rigged from top to bottom.

Capitalism has no solutions

The capitalist system by definition depends on exploiting labor. It must expand for its very survival. There is a deep contradiction between this need and the health needs of the world’s people. Donald Trump may be the crude and at times ludicrous spokesperson for this compulsion to get the capitalist economy running, but bigger systemic forces are driving it.  

Regardless of whether it is prudent or safe, there will be a push to get workers back on the job — not because there isn’t already accumulated wealth within our society that can feed and support every human being while they shelter in place, but because the present system cannot prioritize human needs. 

Capitalists are awash in money, whether it’s sheltered in offshore bank accounts or possessions because it currently can’t be profitably invested, or channeled into the Pentagon death machine. 

The idea of a guaranteed national income no longer seems so radical given the changed circumstances of everyone’s lives, which will likely last far longer than the coronavirus pandemic. If anything, the capitalist crisis will tend toward the expansion of the exploitative gig economy, continued high unemployment, and intensification of the globalization of low-wage work. 

At this moment, there are dozens of halfway emergency measures, such as temporarily halting some evictions, mortgage foreclosures and utility shutoffs. They are sporadic and vary by state and city. But what happens when they are lifted?  

We’ve already seen workers’ actions and strikes all across the country, from Amazon to McDonalds, at hospitals and groceries, by delivery drivers, transportation and postal workers. The lack of regard and planning to defend workers’ lives has fueled workers’ solidarity.

May Day and the Democratic Convention

May Day — International Workers’ Day — is just around the corner. Cooperation Jackson, based in Jackson, Miss., and many other groups have been agitating for a general strike on May 1.  The Peoples Power Assembly in Baltimore and the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles are actively organizing in both the community and at workplaces.

We urge the entire movement to embrace these calls and to organize and promote “No work! No shopping! No rent!” on May Day. 

The Democratic Party Convention has been rescheduled from July to the week of Aug. 17 in Milwaukee. So have the planned protests. We have endorsed the Coalition to March on the DNC and are calling on the largest number of people to participate.  

Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and the Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido are planning caravans from the West Coast, East Coast, the South, Southwest and Midwest. We urge the Sanders movement, particularly the youth, to join with the protests at the DNC. 

Danger of imperialist war

There is an ever-present danger of imperialist war — but that danger is multiplied during a capitalist economic crisis. Any widening of war will intensify racism, jingoism, anti-immigrant violence, misogyny and bigotry against LGBTQ2S people. The Democratic Party, with few exceptions, is a party of war like the Republican Party. It cannot offer a solution. 

The pandemic has revealed that global cooperation and solidarity is a necessity for everyone’s survival. But instead, the U.S. rulers and the Pentagon continue to inflict sanctions on countless countries, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Yemen and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. These sanctions have prevented badly needed supplies to fight the coronavirus from reaching these countries.  

Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary.  But as an insider, he understood the power of the billionaires, and that to realize even a part of his program, it would take a mass movement in the streets, one that included mass resistance in workplaces and communities.  

It’s time we take the torch and build a movement that can move all of humanity forward toward socialism, not backward toward the corrupt capitalist system. We will make mistakes along the way, but we must embark on that road, sooner rather than later. ¡Sí, se puede!

Sharon Black is a national spokesperson for the Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido.

Statement by Coalition to March on the Democratic National Convention
April 10, 2020

On April 8, Senator Bernie Sanders suspended his 2020 Democratic primary campaign. The Sanders campaign has inspired millions of working class and oppressed people, including an overwhelming majority of young people. The movement-building emphasis of the Sanders campaign is what truly sets it apart from anything seen in the U.S. since perhaps Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s.

What Sanders’s candidacy demonstrated again in 2020 is that working and oppressed people in the U.S. want more than what they’ve been afforded under the current system. His candidacy has solidified the fact that the change that people here so desperately need cannot come from the electoral arena. The ruling class who is in control of these mechanisms will not allow a self-proclaimed socialist to attain the highest office in government. However, this exact thing is why Sanders’ insistence on a mass movement of people is so significant.

History has shown that only when masses of people have united around demands, organized themselves into movements, and demonstrated for their causes in workplaces, on campuses, and in communities across the country have they ever been able to win change. The Coalition to March on the DNC exists to bring together as many of those progressive movements as possible in an effort to demonstrate the kind of future that is necessary for the masses of working and oppressed people in the U.S.

We have always sought to build the broadest possible coalition, whether that means revolutionary organizations, non-profits, labor organizations, or any other element within the people’s movements. Most of our points of unity can be connected to the types of things that Bernie has been promoting for his entire life. The Coalition to March on the DNC is a natural landing spot for his supporters who want to keep building the people’s movements.

Defeating Donald Trump is going to be on the minds of most people heading into November. Doing this in a practical sense can take a number of different forms. While some will look to the ballot box as the only option, others will work to develop broader networks, building stronger bases in their workplaces, communities and schools, and seek to challenge Trump and his reactionary policies more directly.

Bernie has always been clear about one thing: regardless of who it is that occupies the White House, without a mass movement at the grassroots level, nothing meaningful will be accomplished. The Coalition to March on the DNC as a temporary alliance of the various people’s movements serves as the most immediate extension of this call to continue organizing.

The start of the DNC has been moved from July 13 to August 17 due to the coronavirus. The Coalition intends to lead a mass demonstration within sight and sound of the Fiserv Forum, including a rally with many speakers and a march. The event will begin at 10 a.m. on Monday, August 17, the first day of the convention. All progressives, socialists and people’s movements are encouraged to make plans to join the Coalition to March on the DNC in Milwaukee this summer. For more information, please visit the Coalition’s website at www.marchondnc.org.

Source: FightBack! News

One year after the police in Cobb County, Ga., assaulted and then arrested Renardo Lewis at an IHOP restaurant, the Lewis family is still waiting for justice.

During this Covid-19 crisis, created by the capitalist system’s callous disregard for our lives, Lewis is still being held under house arrest. A hard-working family man, Lewis is only allowed to work at his restaurant, RC Southern Cooking. He spent over a month in jail last spring for no other reason than the racism of the Cobb County Police.

The Atlanta Peoples Power Assembly is asking people to call the office of Cobb County District Attorney Joyette Holmes at (770) 528-3080 and demand that the charges against Renardo Lewis be dropped.

RC, as he is known by friends and family, states: “We are blessed and thankful to be alive and well during these difficult times. We’re also so thankful for all the support from everyone. That night has changed our lives. Thanks for everything and be safe out there.”

Read more about the Renard Lewis case here.

Rosemary Neidenberg died in Brooklyn, N.Y., on March 29 at the age of 99. For almost a century, her commitment to the revolutionary liberation of humanity never faltered. She was also one of the kindest, funniest, most thoughtful and hardworking people I ever knew. 

Comrade Rosie was born just three years after the Russian Revolution and lived through most of the major events of the 20th century. Through the decades, she was also at the center of building an independent Marxist current in the belly of U.S. imperialism, from the harshest days of the 1950s anti-communist witch-hunt to the defense of Black Liberation fighters Mae Mallory and Robert F. Williams, from the 1970s Food Is A Right campaign led by women of Youth Against War and Fascism to ensuring the uninterrupted distribution of Marxist agitation in the difficult years following the destruction of the USSR. 

She did it all in her modest, mostly behind the scenes, yet utterly indispensable way.

To give just one example of her far-reaching influence, consider that Bob McCubbin, author of the groundbreaking “Roots of Lesbian and Gay Oppression: A Marxist View,” recently wrote that Rosemary Neidenberg “won me to communism.” 

In the dedication to his newest book, “The Social Evolution of Humanity: Marx and Engels were Right!”, McCubbin said: “Rosemary Neidenberg (b. 1921) is a lifelong communist and founding member of Workers World Party, whose anger at imperialism remains undiminished and whose vision of a socialist future for humankind is uncompromised after many decades of struggle with the goal of the establishment of workers’ power here in the world center of capitalism.” 

Lallan Schoenstein recalled: “Rosemary was an inspiration personally and politically. My first encounter with her was in 1970, when I volunteered to help with a large mailing that rallied support for the Black Panthers, ‘Stop the War against Black America.’

“Rosemary was sitting at a long table among 20 or so people who were all decades younger than her. It wasn’t only her bright cheerful colors, but her animated, friendly attention that made her the only person I remember from that day. That first impression was later sealed by her political savvy and dependable support.

“It was impressive to see an older woman who didn’t seem aged,” Schoenstein said. “At first I wasn’t even aware of the significant difficulties she endured from a childhood bout with polio. Her dignity and self-esteem appeared to be generated by profound confidence that the tedium of the work she was responsible for would have a socially revolutionary impact.”

“I’ll always remember Rosie as the most loving and accepting revolutionary I know,” said Lizz Toledo. “After years of my being inactive at the national level, when she saw me at a meeting, she hugged me tight without questions, judgements or reprimands. She was just happy to see me. We shared a very touching, intimate moment as she whispered in my ear, ‘So happy to see you are back, we need you.’” 

That was Rosemary. She valued every comrade, their partners, their children. She was a devoted parent and grandparent herself, together with her life partner, Comrade Milt Neidenberg, who died in February 2018.

As for me, I met Rosie in 1990, when I moved to New York City fresh out of high school and determined to become a revolutionary. As a naive kid raised in rural Wisconsin, I could have run into a lot of problems inside or outside the struggle. Rosemary was one of the comrades who took an interest in me and helped steer me in the best direction. She was warm, witty and so kind that her sometimes sarcastic, always spot-on personal observations never seemed mean-spirited. 

A socialist youth

Rosemary joined the working-class movement as a high-school student in the industrial city of Buffalo, N.Y., during the mighty struggles of the Great Depression. She was fortunate to be on the ground floor of the revolutionary Marxist tendency led by Sam Marcy, Dorothy Ballan and Vince Copeland, which first took shape within the Buffalo branch of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and later founded Workers World Party (WWP) in 1959. They, in turn, were fortunate to have her revolutionary work ethic and charm in their corner.

In the summer of 2018, I interviewed Rosemary about her early experiences in the political struggle. She followed up by writing a brief account filling in more details. Here I share some of that conversation, as much as possible in her own words:

Rosemary Rook was part of a large Catholic family. They lived in her grandmother’s house. Her grandfather had been killed in an industrial accident at the flour mill where he worked before Rosie was born. 

Rosie’s grandmother would tell the story every time a new person came to the house. This made a very deep impact on her consciousness. Also, she recalled that one of her uncles was mercilessly hounded by the police for having stood up to them.

Rosie was struck with polio at age 7. Another uncle taught her to ride a bicycle despite her disability. She was able to pedal with one foot and push down the second, immobilized leg to keep going. Eventually, she was able to ride all over town, even up hills, in this fashion.

In high school, Rosie had a history teacher who recommended socially conscious literature, like the books of Upton Sinclair. She wrote: “Buffalo, N.Y., circa 1938. Fosdick-Masten High School. Cast: progressive history teachers Maurice B. Rovner and M. Rowen. Students Rosemary Rook, Rovner’s class, and Pearl Kessler, Rowen’s class, looking for a socialist organization. Artie Copeland, Rowen’s class, brother to actor Vincent Copeland, on tour with renowned Buffalo actress Katherine Cornell.”

Rosie continued: “Vinnie had been a Communist Party member or sympathizer, but had been introduced to the work of [Russian Revolutionary Leon] Trotsky while performing in Arden, Del., by Libby [Elizabeth Ross]. (Libby and Vinnie had fallen irrevocably in love.) Vinnie wrote political letters to his family. Artie brought one to Rowen’s history class, who shared it with Rovner’s class. Rosemary and Pearl were very impressed. Asked to meet Vinnie, and did. Much mutual admiration took place.”

At the time, Vince Copeland was performing on Broadway. Rosie and her friend Pearl went to meet Vince when he came back to Buffalo to perform in a play there. He invited them to visit him at his parent’s house. This is where their political association began. 

“Previously, Rosemary and Pearl, looking for socialism, had joined a Socialist Labor Party (SLP) study class held at the beautiful Grosvenor Library (where I later worked). At one session, a new member appeared, Frank St. George. He looked like a live one and as he sat opposite me to fill out an application for the class, I read his address upside down. I gave this address to Vinnie.”

A base in Buffalo

When Copeland returned to Buffalo for another play, he decided to set up a branch of the SWP. You needed five people to start a branch. He recruited Frank St. George, who recruited another three of the St. George brothers. “There were five brothers total from a large Italian family. The younger brothers all did what Frank told them to do. One of the younger brothers was quite militant though,” Rosemary explained.

“Much to my surprise and pleasure, the next time we saw Vinnie, there was an SWP branch in Buffalo.” Rosie and Pearl soon joined too.

“Vinnie had left the stage and soon brought Libby and her 4-year-old daughter Deirdre to Buffalo and introduced me to them. [We] quickly became closer than family.

“So the first SWP branch in Buffalo — created by a series of fortunate coincidences.”

Rosie also recalled when Milt Neidenberg moved to Buffalo – the third in a group of young Jewish veterans who came from New York City after World War II, looking for work and to be politically active.

The Buffalo comrades were then campaigning in defense of Willie McGee, an African American man who was sentenced to death in Mississippi on a false charge of raping a white woman. Large protests were organized in many cities. Although the movement was unable to stop McGee’s eventual execution in 1951, the protests reduced the number of legal lynchings and helped force the passing of anti-lynching legislation.

Rosie said she knew she was in love with Milt when she saw him at a street meeting for Willie McGee in the Black community. Two young women from the community came and spoke. She remembered seeing Milt handing out fliers in a very respectful way: “He was very dashing.” 

She also recalled buying a lot of Marxist books afterward, chuckling that it was “a dowry” as part of her plan to win his affections. She was successful, she said, but after so many years couldn’t remember if the books helped!

Today, the members and supporters of Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and the Socialist Unity Party work to carry forward the revolutionary ideas and traditions established by Sam Marcy, Dorothy Ballan and Vince Copeland in the modern conditions of decayed, crisis-ridden capitalism. As we do so, we proudly uphold the example of revolutionary worker Rosemary Neidenberg as one to aspire to.

Comrade Rosemary Neidenberg, ¡presente!