Veteran PL Farmworker’s Inspiring Stories of Battles in the Fields

LOS ANGELES, CA, August 9 –– After another day of CHALLENGE sales, house visits, and study groups, L.A. Summer Project volunteers took a trip through history when one of the main PL organizers of the migrant worker struggles, Epifanio Camacho, hosted a “carne asada” (BBQ). With the smell of collectively-prepared barbeque in the background and under a large shade tree, PLP volunteers squeezed into Camacho’s yard, many unsure of what to expect.

Camacho began speaking of the political work in Delano of organizing workers, comparing it to birds spreading seeds. In Delano, often workers from Mexico would learn communist politics and then return home where the lessons and politics they learned could one day bear fruit. This is one way that communism spreads around the world. Camacho fielded questions from PL youth and former Delano Project participants alike, opening up discussions that are still echoing through the Summer Project

Camacho spoke about his experiences working with Cesar Chavez, the misleader of the United Farm Workers Union. When asked if he thought Chavez, who would regularly turn workers over to immigration officers and make deals with bosses behind the workers backs, should be given a holiday, he instantly said, “Hell no!” He told stories of how Chavez went on a hunger strike to stop violence against scabs (the bosses canonized him in the media).  Later Camacho told how he and the workers of his town organized a demonstration against the fascist police who were terrorizing and killing workers. The militant demonstration was held in the police station were the workers threatened to burn the station down if they did not stop the fascist attacks. This action chased out the cops –– almost 20 years ago –– and they never came back. His stories were inspirational to everyone.

Just like the work in Delano sent seeds of communist thought through Mexico, so will the L.A. and Seattle Summer Project participants spread the lessons we’re learning and the excitement we’re building through CHALLENGE sales, study groups, and collective living across the country when we return to our home cities.J
(Camacho’s memoirs are on PLP.org)

Ira Gollobin: A Communist for All Seasons

Ira Gollobin, a great friend of PLP who made an enormous contribution in the area of dialectical materialism, died from a staph infection in his blood and lungs on Friday, April 4, in his 97th year. In a lifetime of struggle, Ira was as much at home on the picket line as in the courtroom. He never stopped fighting for nearly an entire century!

In addition to authoring one of the definitive works on Dialectics, Ira had a great influence on PLP. He was present at a December 1961 meeting of a group of about 30 members of the old Communist Party (CP) who had concluded that the CP was dead as a communist organization and that it was necessary to organize a new party. Out of that meeting the Progressive Labor Movement was born six months later, and the Progressive Labor Party three years after that. Ira endorsed that outlook.

For years afterwards, he taught many classes on dialectics to leaders and members of PL and was partly responsible for the crucial emphasis PLP has placed on members studying this subject. This was probably his most important contribution to our Party. In addition, Ira was our lawyer in many government attacks on the Party, as far back as the early 1960s, and then taking the offensive against the witch-hunting House UnAmerican Activities Committee ( HUAC). Ira always agreed with our position to not simply rely on the “legal” front but to organize militant demonstrations and make a political defense (which many other lawyers told us would “hurt” our case).

In his early years as an attorney in New York City, Ira defended many victims of the Great Depression. After he passed the bar in 1935, he left New York to spend a year “seeing the country.” He became a migrant worker, picking oranges and walnuts in the fields of the West, “riding the rails” with jobless workers. He said these experiences “sealed my identification with the underdog.”

When distributing leaflets during a strike at Presbyterian Hospital in NYC, he met members of the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born and eventually this cause dominated his life as he became the country’s leading immigration lawyer and a member of the Committee’s General Counsel. He saved the jobs of 1,500 NYC foreign-born transit workers and enabled workers fleeing Nazi Germany and Franco’s fascist Spain to be admitted to the U.S. He won a landmark decision before the U.S. Supreme Court for 300 Haitian immigrants who had been refused asylum, the government claiming they were “economic” refugees, but Ira won the case to identify them as political refugees fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship.

Over the years we sent him scores of workers with immigration problems and he successfully defended them against government attacks (money for fees was never an obstacle).

Ira was part of a generation that risked their lives to join the fight against fascism, first in the Spanish Civil War, and then against the Nazis and the Japanese fascists, a fight led by the world communist movement. Ira was more than a lawyer. Being a dialectician, he understood the necessity to practice what he preached.

Serving in the Philippines in the army when World War II ended in 1945, he led a struggle to prevent U.S. rulers from using thousands of GI’s to repress the communist-led Filipino guerrilla movement (the “Huks”) — that had been crucial in defeating the Japanese — and even to ship them to Vietnam to assist the French colonial oppressors in that country. But the GI’s, having defeated Japanese fascism, were seeking to return home and wanted no part of this, looking on the “Huks” as comrades-in-arms. So Ira helped organize militant actions opposing the brass, putting 35,000 GI’s into the streets of Manila on January 7, 1946. He led a 5-member committee that met with the brass to tell them the GI’s would refuse to carry out this mission for U.S. imperialism. They succeeded and the GI’s were shipped home over the ensuing months (although Ira and the committee were immediately flown back to the States, the brass not wanting to deal with their leadership). The “Bring the Boys Home” movement soon spread around the world.

Ira was a stickler for physical fitness. In his 70’s and 80’s he was still running six miles a day, six days a week and was working out in the gym three times a week in his 90’s. (In going through his belongings in the hospital his daughter found his gym card still in his back pocket.) He spent 20 years writing his monumental work, “Dialectical Materialism, Its Laws, Categories and Practice.”

Ira was a supporter of PLP right to the end, generous in his financial donations, giving our Party five cartons of Marxist books from his personal library. The revolutionary communist movement will sorely miss Ira, but his contribution to Marxist theory and practice will live on in our members’ study of dialectical materialism and the carrying out of that theory in practice, a cause to which Ira devoted his life. The best way we can honor him is to use those tools to organize a communist revolution and the emancipation of the working class.

Lesson of Mack Ave. Wildcat: Scratch A Liberal, Find A Fascist

In December, Justin Ravitz died. He was the judge in 1974 who tried to jail the Chrysler workers who led the Mack Avenue Sit-Down strike. In August 1973, 350 workers seized the plant after a comrade was fired for his role in an anti-racist health and safety struggle, and reported to work the next day, refusing to leave.

Chrysler security was driven out of the plant, and the next day, the workers faced off against the Detroit police chanting, “FIGHT BACK! – FIGHT BACK!” It finally took 1,000 thugs organized by the UAW, just about everyone on the payroll and many KKK members, to violently retake the plant for the bosses. A white comrade and a black worker who gave crucial leadership to the action were arrested and each charged with two counts of felonious assault.

Ravitz had a reputation as an anti-racist lawyer and criminal court judge. He was involved in the legal dismantling of STRESS, a police undercover unit that murdered 20 people, 17 of them black, and fought to have more black people on juries. He called himself the only Marxist judge in the U.S., banned the American flag from his courtroom in protest of the Vietnam War, and refused to stand for the pledge when he was sworn in. But when it came to prosecuting PLP and communist-led workers, Ravitz was on the side of Chrysler, the UAW leadership and the Detroit police.

At the time, the bosses were still trying to retake control of the major cities, after the armed rebellions of the late 1960’s. Henry Ford and the New Detroit alliance of bosses, bankers and politicians were calling the shots in Detroit, pulling the strings of Coleman Young, a former Communist Party auto organizer and Detroit’s first black mayor, and a City Council of preachers and fake radicals.
PLP relied on auto workers and youth to wage a political defense around the city, exposing Ravitz and the bosses he served. Every notice posted inside the plant soliciting prosecution witnesses was torn down in minutes. Literature saturated numerous plants, Wayne State University, and unemployment and welfare offices, calling on workers and students to defend PLP, the Mack Sit-Down and exposing Ravitz, the UAW leaders, and the rest. Many supporters attended the trial, and many more gave money. The black worker who was arrested, a Vietnam vet, joined the Party on the very day he was called to testify.
Ultimately, the case was tossed out. There was a provision in the law at the time that the prosecution had to produce witnesses from a cross section of the population that witnessed the alleged crime. The Chrysler bosses, UAW and the Detroit police could not produce one Chrysler production worker to testify against the defendants. Not one. Case dismissed. Ravitz was beside himself, and scolded the cops and Chrysler bosses for failing to make their case.

A lot has happened since then, and today Detroit is a shell of what it was. Every anti-racist “reform” has given way to more and deeper racist oppression, from mass unemployment and poverty to crumbling schools and over-crowded jails. The infant mortality rate here is comparable to that of the poor countries in the Caribbean. This is the legacy of the reformers like Ravitz, who above all else were loyal to the profit system until the end. And we are better off for having fought them.

Mack Ave. Defender

Lessons of ‘Boston 75’ Crucial to PLP’s Future

The four months between May Day 1975 in Boston and the first day of school there in early September remains one of the sharpest sustained periods of struggle our Party has yet experienced. The anti-racist summer project BOSTON 75 remains rich in lessons and examples.

The most important is that gutter fascists like ROAR can be beaten even when they are protected to the hilt by the bosses’ state apparatus and made to appear invincible by the bosses’ media. The battle of May Day 1975 had already exposed ROAR as a paper tiger. In the ensuing months, the tiger lost its fangs and claws.

The BOSTON 75 volunteers were relatively few in number. Most had little experience in politics or class struggle. They were young, the majority in their twenties. They had to live on a shoestring. They confronted the daily fury of the ruling class’s dictatorship. Between June and September, the volunteers saw the inside of Boston’s jails more than 200 times. Some were arrested twice or even three and four times. A few eventually received prison sentences.

Yet, despite these attacks, they won a clear strategic victory. They proved that a small force of bold, determined anti-racists under communist leadership could at least temporarily thwart a ruling class bent on building a mass-based fascist movement. The numbers tell the story.

The day before the Boston schools opened in September 1975, ROAR led a demonstration of 3,000 people at City Hall, down from the 15,000 in a similar racist mobilization in 1974. Sporadic racist violence characterized the 1975-76 school year, but it never reached the proportions of 1974-75. ROAR’s public activities dwindled to a series of poorly-attended anti-integration “mothers’ prayer marches.” Fascist Louise Day Hicks soon abandoned politics altogether and in time fell into disgrace after her son was exposed as a dealer of illegal drugs. Shortly after BOSTON 75, the ROAR organization was dead in the water. PLP and the Committee Against Racism (CAR) deserve the lion’s share of credit for killing it.

BOSTON 75 therefore belongs to the living history of the PLP and the working class. For four months, against great odds, communists and anti-racists inflicted important political and tactical defeats on the ruling class of a great city and its plans to turn a large portion of the working class into Nazi thugs.

The project nonetheless had serious weaknesses; their lessons remain valid today. The most important was political, which grew out of the Party’s basic line at that time. By 1975, PLP had rejected nationalism — the idea that there were “progressive” bosses, even though they all believed in capitalism and would try to stop the working class from taking the road to revolution. This tied into also rejecting the theory of making revolution by stages, the idea that we could get to communism while still retaining some of the elements of capitalism (such as the wage system) — socialism — because workers “weren’t ready for communism.” But we still believed in socialism. We didn’t come to understand this error until seven years after the adoption of Road to Revolution IV in 1982. (For the full text of this document, see the PL website, PLP.org)

In practical terms, we continued to initiate reform organizations through which we would function, such as CAR — later InCAR. We had founded it in 1973. It achieved much: organized BOSTON 75 and the fight against ROAR; launched militant mass struggle against leading academic racist theoreticians like Richard Herrnstein and E.O. Wilson; and led many battles against attempts to revive the Ku Klux Klan.

But ultimately, with all their militancy, CAR and InCAR were still reform organizations. In creating them, we had committed two serious mistakes. Firstly, we were substituting them for existing mass organizations in which we should have been deeply active and struggling directly for communist ideas and the Party, both during the BOSTON 75 project and elsewhere over the long run. Secondly, related to the first, was the implicit belief that the workers and students we expected to move to communism needed a “half-way house” — a PLP-led militant reform organization — on the way to joining the Party. This was an opportunist error, allowing us to win people to militant reform, something less than the communism we stood for. We thought we had licked this aspect of opportunism, at least in theory. We were wrong.

In the ensuing three decades, we’ve been trying to absorb these lessons, as the pages of CHALLENGE show. In the face of rising imperialist war and the bosses’ advance towards police-state fascism, this task has become increasingly urgent today. We defeated ROAR, a specific manifestation of U.S. fascism, despite working with one hand tied behind our back. It would be sheer folly to think that the experience could be repeated in the present period with an identical political approach and tactics.

We fight to preserve the spirit of boldness, militancy, anti-racism, and class hatred that characterized PLP’s work during the campaign against ROAR. We reject the opportunism of “two-stage” approaches to communist organizing. The victory against ROAR was an important battle, but it was temporary. The war against the profit system continues. The lessons learned in Boston more than 30 years ago should help the Party improve its leadership in the battles and trials ahead.

PL History: Anti-Racists’ Multi-Racial Unity Defies Rulers’ Attacks

(Last issue’s article about the 1975 summer of struggle against racism in Boston recounted the rulers’ unsuccessful red-baiting campaign against the Committee Against Racism and the PLP, and the cops’ attempt to ban CAR — later known as INCAR, the International Committee Against Racism — from marching on City Hall with an anti-racist petition containing 35,000 signatures.)

Early in the morning of August 18 — the planned march date — INCAR members and their lawyers went to court to enjoin the ban. The judge bent over backwards to help the cops’ lawyers present their own case. But they had no case, even by the lopsided standards of capitalist “justice.”

The cops’ attorney was reduced to arguing that since the commissioner had already canceled the march, it was too late to assign enough police to manage it. This he argued despite the hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes cops stationed along the march’s route at that very moment, waiting to prevent it.

In a public courtroom, the judge faced the alternative between flagrantly denying the right to free speech and assembly, supposedly “guaranteed” by the U.S. Constitution, and restoring the permit for the sake of protecting the system’s democratic façade. This time, the mayor and cops had gone too far, even by their own standards. The judge regretfully revoked the ban, and 300 people marched. It was one of the summer’s highlights. Thousands of workers watched from the street and shouted friendly encouragement to the demonstrators.

One speaker, INCAR’s chairperson at the time, aroused a collective shout of militant anti-racist anger when he said: “We will turn ROAR into a mee-ow!” and then, pointing to Hicks, O’Neill, & Co., who were watching from their City Hall offices, led the demonstrators in collectively giving these fascists the finger.

After that march, most of the volunteers returned home to prepare for school openings. Some decided to remain in Boston to consolidate the gains made over the summer and to build both PLP and the anti-racist movement there. The project’s final action came on September 8, the opening day of the 1975-76 school year. A year earlier, at the start of the busing program, ROAR thugs had thrown rocks at busses carrying young black schoolchildren into South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, etc., and had otherwise conducted a racist rampage throughout the city, under the benevolent gaze of Boston’s police. Having proven that the ROAR goons didn’t reflect the views of most Bostonian workers, INCAR and PLP were now intent on organizing a demonstration for multi-racial unity outside South Boston High School on opening day.

Two busloads carrying anti-racist black, white and Latino students and workers set out for “Southie” on the morning of the 8th. As the busses were crossing the bridge leading into South Boston, the cops pulled them over. A lieutenant named Bradley boarded and informed the anti-racists that they were all under arrest. “What for?” asked one of them, a final-year law student. “Well,” answered Bradley, “you’re not exactly creating a disturbance, but your presence could tend to create one.” The law student retorted: “There’s no such thing as ‘tending to create a disturbance.’ Your arrest is completely illegal.” “Don’t worry,” chuckled Bradley, “we’ll think of something.”

Before depositing the demonstrators in a South Boston jail, the cops made a point of handcuffing them so tightly that many lost circulation in their wrists. On the way to the jailhouse, the demonstrators were treated to a volley of racist vulgarities from the cops in the front of the vans transporting them. Once the demonstrators were behind bars, a cop at the jailhouse greeted them by saying, “Comes the revolution, we’ll kill every f—— one of you.” No one was intimidated, and spirits remained high.
After spending the day locked up, the demonstrators were transported in police vans back to the Park Street subway station in downtown Boston. The cops’ original plan had been to release them at dusk onto the South Boston streets, where they might have been easy prey for a cop-ROAR trap. At the request of a PLP member, who had spent a good part of the day befriending a public defender from behind bars, the lawyer agreed to accompany several shifts of demonstrators on the ride to Park Street. The thought was that with a public defender in the van as a witness, the cops wouldn’t dare try their usual brutalities. This estimate proved correct. The demonstrators held a short, defiant rally at Park Street.

The public defender’s courageous action had taught a valuable political lesson: sharp situations provide important opportunities to do the “right thing,” and given the proper encouragement, many people can be won to rise to the occasion.

BOSTON 75 proved that under determined communist leadership, a relatively small number of militant anti-racists can put the rulers, their state apparatus and their gutter racist henchmen on the defensive. This was one of the project’s important lessons. In the final installment, we will discuss others, including the crucial ones to learn from its weaknesses.

PL History: Red-baiting, ROAR’s Rampage Can’t Stop Boston’s Anti-Racists

(Last issue’s article about the anti-racist struggle in Boston during the summer of 1975 recounted the battle of Carson Beach. PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (INCAR) once again successfully battled the segregationist thugs in ROAR and defeated a trap set by Boston’s cops, liberal politicians, the NAACP and an unholy alliance of nationalists and Trotskyists.)

The day after Carson Beach, rebellions erupted in several sections of Boston. Black workers and working-class youth, who had had their fill of racism and police terror, fought the cops with every weapon at their disposal. The cops responded by running amok in ghetto projects, breaking indiscriminately into homes and unleashing trained killer dogs on elderly people and children.

The rebellions were somewhat tainted with nationalism. A few black youths stoned cars carrying white passengers or otherwise attacked white people. Given the racist atrocities that had occurred every day in Boston for years, the absence until recently of a mass campaign against them and the rulers’ encouragement of nationalism, this mistake was not surprising. The bosses’ media portrayed the rebellion as “black mobs out to kill whitey.”

Meanwhile, ROAR escalated its fascist violence, conducting ferocious gang assaults against black workers several nights in a row. As usual, no ROAR members were arrested.

Some of the most serious physical and political attacks against BOSTON 75 took place during the week after the Carson Beach fight. The day after the beach incident, a small group of INCAR members were leaving a television studio interview, when about 40 ROAR thugs attacked with clubs and other weapons, including a machete. The thugs were led by Warren Zaniboni, a “South Boston Marshal,” whom Ted Kennedy would later dignify with an invitation to discuss busing. The anti-racists fought back valiantly. They made good their escape onto a city bus with the help of the white driver, who slammed the door in the fascists’ face and drove away. The INCAR members went to Boston City Hospital for treatment. While they were in the emergency room, the cops showed up with the ROAR goons and arrested the anti-racists for “assault with a dangerous weapon.”

Seeing that the combination of ROAR’s terror tactics and their own state power had still not succeeded in crushing the anti-racists, Boston’s rulers launched a political red-baiting campaign. Suffolk County District Attorney Byrne claimed that the violence at Carson Beach had been caused by “outside agitators,” who had come to Boston to start “racial disorders.” He named INCAR and PLP and said that 18 “special prosecutors” would work 24 hours a day to produce indictments in the case. Deputy Police Supt. John Doyle told the newspapers that INCAR members had thrown the first rocks at Carson Beach.

The lies went on and on.

However, the red-baiting proved a complete fiasco. The task force of “special prosecutors” vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, without producing a single prosecution. Boston’s workers didn’t fall for the red-baiting. The organized fascist forces failed to grow during the weeks after Carson Beach. Meanwhile, thousands of people throughout greater Boston continued to sign the INCAR petition.

BOSTON 75’s last major action was a demonstration planned for August 18th, when the volunteers intended to present INCAR’s petition, signed by 35,000 people, to a regularly-scheduled City Council meeting. CHALLENGE readers will remember that several Boston City Councilors proudly flaunted their ROAR membership.

Weeks earlier, INCAR had obtained a permit to march to City Hall. However, Mayor White and the cops had one more trick up their sleeves. Late on Friday afternoon, August 15th, three cops came to the INCAR office with a letter from the Traffic Commissioner revoking the permit for the Monday march. He offered no reason. The rulers obviously thought that this timing would prevent INCAR from organizing against the ban. The press announced that the march would not take place.

As usual, the bosses and their media mouthpieces had underestimated the resourcefulness and commitment of INCAR and PLP.

(Next: The August 18 march; INCAR and PLP prepare to demonstrate in South Boston on the first day of school.)