Anti-Asian Discrimination and the History of Struggle

By Steve Halpern

The other day, I viewed two stories on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer about the horrendous murders of eight people, including six Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia. In reading this story, I learned that the city of Atlanta is located in Cherokee Country. The Cherokee were one of the first nations of Georgia. The government forced the Cherokee to march to the Indian Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. Thousands died in that forced march. 

Then, I looked on page two of the Inquirer. There was a story about President Biden’s answer to a question about Vladimir Putin. Does he think Putin is a murderer? Biden answered, “I do.” 

Clearly, Vladimir Putin is one of the many ruthless dictators in the world. His policies reflect a total betrayal of the goals of the Russian Revolution. However, Putin responded to Biden by reminding him of the atomic bombing of Japan in World War II, the history of slavery and the slaughtering of Native Americans. 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to those comments. “The President believes that one of the greatest attributes of the United States is our honest self-reflection, and our constant striving for progress, and there’s always more work to do.”

Well, across the street from the White House is a statue of former President Andrew Jackson. A portrait of Jackson is on the twenty-dollar bill.  During his presidency, the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee had a right to live in their homeland in Georgia. President Jackson responded, that if the Supreme Court wanted that decision to be enforced, they would have to enforce it themselves. 

The government then gave the land of the Cherokee to slave owners. After the Civil War, the land of the Cherokee in Oklahoma was given to settlers free of charge. So, I have to question the statement by the President Biden that he is interested in an, “honest self-reflection.”

Chinese immigration

Chinese people began to immigrate to this country during the gold rush in the 1800s. At that time, China was ruled by the Manchu dynasty. The United States had been investing in China for many years. Jacob Astor owned much of Manhattan island. He traded furs to China, and also profited from the opium trade. 

Warren Delano Jr. was the grandfather of Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Warren Delano also profited from the opium trade in China, in flagrant violation of Chinese law. In those days, Britain was the primary imperialist power in China. The United States was one of the other powers that profited from Manchu Rule.

China was thrown into an economic crisis because of its defeat in the Opium Wars. The majority Han nationality rebelled against the Manchu royal family in the Taiping Rebellion. The imperialists supported the Manchus, and the Taiping rebellion was defeated at the cost of millions of lives. This was one of the reasons why people from southern China came to the United States, as well as many other nations.

Gold had been discovered in California and people came from all over the world looking for a chance to make a fortune. The Chinese mined some of the less lucrative areas, but were persistent in making those areas productive. 

At that time, the state government of California singled out the Chinese for a repressive tax. Much of the revenue of California came from this tax on the Chinese workers.

At that time, the diet in this country consisted largely of meat and potatoes. Chinese workers organized regular shipments of food from their homeland. This Chinese connection greatly diversified the diet in this country.

In the 1800s health care in this country was nothing like it is today. Doctors used concoctions that might or might not be effective. A cut on a leg or arm might mean amputation because there was no effective way of preventing gangrene.

The Chinese have a history of thousands of years of medical research. They studied the effects of how various plants could remedy all kinds of illnesses and injuries. Even today, Chinese acupuncture is used in prominent hospitals. So, Chinese doctors became respected in this country for their effective treatment of patients in the 19th century.

Then, there was the arduous task of building the transcontinental railroad. Chinese railroad workers toiled under horrendous conditions to build the railroad that transformed the economy of this country. They used primitive implements to blast through granite mountains. They worked under snow drifts, in the frigid cold, and in the heat of the summer. Even today, historians are baffled by some of the techniques the Chinese used to blast through those mountains.

However, after the Chinese railroad workers carried out this heroic project, the government drafted the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law prohibited Chinese people from immigrating to this country for decades. Just as there were racist and murderous raids of Black communities, there were also murderous raids of Chinese communities. 

The Japanese internment camps

President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt had two documents on his desk during the Second World War. According to the Versailles Treaty adopted after the First World War, Germany was no longer allowed to import armaments. Roosevelt had conclusive evidence that there were corporations in this country that were exporting armaments to Germany. Roosevelt did nothing to punish those corporations.

At that same time, there were people in the government who suspected Japanese citizens of this country of spying for Japan. So, there was a ten-year surveillance program of Japanese that was in full violation of the Constitution. The conclusion of this surveillance program was that the Japanese were in no way a threat to the security of this country. Roosevelt responded to this report by arresting 110,000 Japanese and sending them to internment camps. This again was in flagrant violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that is supposed to guarantee “equal protection under the law.” 

In the year 2013 the United States government issued an apology to Japanese families for the internment camps. The government also gave out checks of $20,000 in compensation for the years Japanese spent in those concentration camps. 

There has never been compensation for the 400 treaties the government violated with respect to Native Americans. There has never been compensation for the years of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, or the current institutionalized discrimination against African Americans. There has never been an apology or compensation for the wars against the people of Korea and Vietnam. Yet President Biden argues that he has an “honest self-reflection” of the history of this country.

China

There has been an interesting development that unfolded during the last forty years. After the Second World War, the United States made alliances with nations in Europe and Asia in an effort to stop the advance of the Soviet Union and China.

In Europe they called this the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance or NATO. In Asia alliances were made with Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. In Asia, U.S. corporations also aided in the industrialization of their allies.

However, as the economist Adam Smith argued, capitalism is ruled by an “invisible hand.” Capitalists bow to the drive to move capital to places where they can maximize profits. So, the so-called “Asian Tigers” that had received significant aid from the United States, began investing in China. Why were those massive investments made in China, the same nation the United States government had been determined to isolate?

We see from history that capitalists invest in nations where there are low wages and governments that ruthlessly repress all genuine efforts at reform. We see how the U.S. government worked to overthrow the reform governments of Mohammed Mossadegh, in Iran, Patrice Lumumba, in the Congo, Salvador Allende in Chile, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. 

While the Chinese Revolution was in many ways an anti-capitalist revolution, the government ruled by Mao Zedong became a repressive disaster. The so-called Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were clear examples of the disastrous consequences of Mao’s rule.

After Mao’s rule, Deng Xiaoping became the new leader of the Chinese government and opened up China to capitalist investment. Deng offered a repressive government as well as a working class that would grow to hundreds of millions. 

So, while capitalists grew wealthy because of their investments in China, most of the Chinese population had a significant improvement in their standard of living. This improved standard of living was paid for with horrendous working conditions at minimal wages. 

However, we also see in numerous examples around the world that when the working class is faced with horrendous conditions, there has also been determined resistance. During the past three years there have been about 20,000 labor strikes in China every year. There have been massive demonstrations in Hong Kong protesting the dictatorial rule of Beijing. 

Today, China is on a course to become the largest economy in the world. Just as the so-called “invisible hand” of capitalism attracted investment in China, now China has investments all over the world. 

In the 19th century the U.S. government used Chinese workers to build the railroads. Then, this same government adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act. 

Today, China is making investments all over the world with their “Belt and Road” initiative. As an emerging capitalist center, the Chinese power brokers are funding railroads and communication projects throughout the globe. 

Chinese Cubans

Cuba is one of the nations that is a part of the Chinese diaspora. Thousands of Chinese immigrants supported the Cuban war of independence in the late 19th century. Many Chinese Cubans also supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Unlike the experience of the Chinese people in the rest of the diaspora, the experience of the Chinese Cubans is unique. In China, Chinese workers are routinely exploited because of corporate profit. This is also the experience of Chinese workers in the rest of the world. Many Chinese people who have prominent positions, also have also adopted to the corporate drive for profit.

While Cuba doesn’t have the resources of other countries, the government makes the needs of the people the top priority. So, in this environment Chinese Cubans have become genuine leaders on the island. Because of this reality, racist discrimination against Chinese Cubans is no longer the reality of life in Cuba.

Conclusion

I believe there is clear conclusion that we can draw from this largely swarded history. This was summarized by the revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin when he argued that the capitalist state is a “special repressive force.” Malcolm X spoke about the ruthless violence against African Americans in all of the United States when he argued, “Stop talking about the South. If you’re south of Canada, you’re in the South.”

Yesterday, I attended a demonstration in solidarity with Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama. This will be one of many demonstrations all over the country. My opinion is that the future of this country is with those Amazon workers who are voting to be represented by a union. My opinion is that the rights of these workers are more important than the profit drive of Jeffrey Bezos who has assets of about $200 billion.

The fight against discrimination and violence against Asians who live in this country is a central component to the liberation of the entire working class. Growing numbers of workers are beginning to see this indisputable reality.          

The 24th

 

Written by Kevin Willmont and Trai Byers

Directed by Kevin Willmont

Starring Trai Byers

Distributed by Vertical Entertainment, 2020

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

The other evening, I viewed the film “The 24th.” This is a largely true story of how the racist violence of Houston, Texas in 1917 provoked the 24th African American infantry battalion to take up arms in an attempt to defend themselves.

In the summer of 1917 Houston police officers entered the home of Sara Travers, who was a mother of five children. An officer dragged Travers into the street, beat, and arrested her. 

Private Alonzo Edwards of the 24th questioned the officers about this arrest. The officers pistol-whipped and arrested him. Then, Corporal Charles Baltimore inquired about the arrest of Edwards. He was also pistol-whipped and arrested. 

A rumor circulated throughout the military camp that Baltimore had been killed by the police. After someone from the military arranged for the release of Baltimore and he returned to the base, the atmosphere calmed a bit. This atmosphere had been stoked by the routine racist violence members of the 24th had been subjected to. 

Apparently, a racist mob had been organized in Houston and the soldiers in the 24th felt the need to arm in an attempt to defend themselves. Earlier that year, a racist mob invaded the Black community in East St. Louis and murdered between 40 and 250 residents. 6,000 of those residents became homeless because this mob torched their homes. About 10,000 people demonstrated in New York City against the mass murder in East Saint Louis.  

So, about 150 members of the 24th marched into Houston armed. In all, about 20 people, including about five police officers lost their lives. As was portrayed in the film, Sargent Vida Henry shook the hands of everyone in the 24th and claimed he was preparing to commit suicide, rather than face execution. Whether Henry committed suicide or died as a result of murder is undetermined.

This film clearly portrayed the reasons why these soldiers engaged in armed rebellion. This is a strong point of the film. While government demanded that these soldiers risk their lives to defend this country, this same government supported the Jim Crow laws that stripped Black people of citizenship rights. 

The government had done nothing to convict the murderers of thousands of Black people in lynchings all over this country. All of this was in spite of the fact that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution argued that there is supposed to be “equal protection under the laws.”

So, the military court that sentenced 13 of these soldiers to death, was indifferent to the fact that the government routinely and flagrantly violated the Constitution. All that court was concerned with was the fact that these officers had murdered people. The thousands of Black people who had been lynched were of absolutely no concern.

I first learned of the 1917 rebellion in Houston when I read Paula J. Giddings excellent biography of Ida Wells titled: Ida – A Sword Among Lions. Ida Wells visited the soldiers of the 24th after they were arrested. Wells had a reputation for an uncompromising opponent of lynching, and the soldiers showed their respect by saluting her when she entered Leavenworth Penitentiary. 

In an article Wells wrote for the Defender she called the soldiers of the 24th “stalwart young chaps.” In that article she concluded that whatever “the motive and however wrong the action, his bravery and daring will make his memory live forever in the hearts of those who knew his story.” 

After returning to her home, Wells had buttons made in solidarity with the soldiers of the 24th. Federal agents visited her home and threatened her with arrest if she continued to distribute those buttons. When she asked what she would be charged with, the answer was “treason.” When the agents told Wells that her support of the 24th was a minority position she responded that she’d rather go down in “history as the one lone Negro who dared to tell the government it had done a dastardly thing.” Wells felt that it would be an “honor” to be charged with treason for defending the soldiers of the 24th.

In an article in the Crisis the newspaper of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois criticized the double standard of the government that allowed, “hundreds of thousands of white murderers, rapists, and scoundrels” to walk “scot-free’ and “unrebuked by the President of the United States.”

When I first read of this story, I thought that a meaningful portrayal would never make it as a film in this country. Clearly there haven’t been films made of outstanding leaders like Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, Eugene Debs, or Mother Jones. 

I thought that a film made about African American soldiers murdering sheriffs in Houston, Texas would be too controversial for what is seen as politically acceptable in this country. Well, the screening of The 24th proved me to be wrong. Perhaps the filming of this story might be taken in context of the massive demonstrations protesting racist police murders.   

Related events to the 1917 Houston Rebellion of the 24th

We might also consider that at this time, President Woodrow Wilson was in the middle of his drive for war. Like several other Presidents, Wilson promised to avoid the war, but after he was elected he pursued a ruthless policy that sent opponents of the war to prison.

Alice Paul led a demonstration in front of the White House of suffragettes. Paul argued that Wilson’s so-called war for “democracy” was a joke when women didn’t have the right to vote. These demonstrators were arrested. While in prison, they went on a hunger strike protesting their horrendous conditions. The prison guards inserted a tube into Paul’s throat and force-fed her three times every day.

Eugene Debs gave a speech against U.S. participation in the World War I in 1918 in Canton, Ohio. Debs was charged with “sedition,” and the evidence against him was a transcript of his speech. He served three years of a ten-year sentence. 

However, between the time of the rebellion of the 24th and their execution, a revolution erupted in what had been Czarist Russia. While the Ku Klux Klan raided the Black community and murdered thousands in this country, Czarist Russian experienced a similar reality. There, the Black Hundreds raided Jewish communities and were known to murder thousands. While the government in this country refused to prosecute those who carried out lynchings, the Czar openly supported the Black Hundreds.

The new revolutionary government of the Bolsheviks declared that all the oppressed nations in that country would now have self-determination. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin argued that the support of all those nationalities was essential if the Russian Revolution would succeed. The name of the new nation was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 

The United States government sent the armed forces to join the fourteen nations that invaded the U.S.S.R. in an attempt to overthrow the new revolutionary government. Under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, the Red Army defeated all those powers. While many of the gains of the revolution were betrayed by Joseph Stalin, that revolution continues to be an example for the world.

So, when we think of the 1917 rebellion of the 24th, we also might think of the 1917 Russian Revolution that overthrew a regime that supported racist murderers. In my opinion, this is a useful way to look at the film The 24th in context.                  

Amend: The Fight for America

 

Starring: Will Smith, Mahershala Ali, Lavern Cox

Creators: Robe Imbriano, Tom Yellin

Available on Netflix

Reviewed by: Steve Halpern

Recently, I viewed the Netflix documentary Amend: The Fight for America. This film series centers around the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. I found this documentary series to be worth watching for several reasons. However, this series also has severe limitations. 

One of those limitations is in the title, “Amend: The Fight for America.” The documentary gives ample evidence that this nation has always had persistent and vicious divisions. These divisions illustrate how there are conflicting interests that have been battling each other throughout the history of this country. Therefore, I believe we need to ask the question: Whose interests have working people been struggling for and against throughout the history of this country?

Before answering that question, there are other aspects of this documentary that we might consider. I believe there are three episodes of Amend that deal with the history of the 14th Amendment with respect to slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the civil rights movement. Much of this history isn’t known to many viewers, and uncovering that information makes the documentary worth seeing. 

Then, there were segments about women’s liberation, gay rights, and immigrant rights. All these segments are tied together with the idea in the 14th Amendment about “equal protection under the law.”

One problem with this documentary is that it views the 14th Amendment as a hope or a promise, and not a law. After the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Will Smith argued that there were many people who didn’t like it. 

One of the arguments segregationist racists used was that they thought they were defending a “way of life.” We might recall that during the years of slavery, most of the white population lived in dirt-poor poverty under the coercive rule of slave owners. The vast majority had no access to education or health care.

 

The reconstruction governments began to provide education for both black and white residents for the first time. So, when people argued that they wanted to defend their “way of life” they were arguing for a life of abject poverty with no possibility of educating themselves.    

The defeat of radical reconstruction

Amend showed how the government sent the armed forces to the former slave states to actively repress those who tried to reimpose slavery with the Black Codes. Then, President Rutherford B. Hayes made a deal that took the federal troops out of the former salve states in 1877. In that same year, those federal troops were used in a war against the Native Americans known as the Nez Perce. Also, in 1877 federal troops were used to murder rail-workers who were on strike against a corporation owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

President Hayes’ actions were in concert with several decisions made by the Supreme Court. 

First, there was the Slaughterhouse case of 1873. This case made it clear that the Supreme Court had no intention of defending the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court concluded that state law can supersede the federal law and the Constitution.

Then, there was the Cruikshank v. United States case. In this case we see how the Supreme Court of the United States openly supported mass murder. In Colfax, Louisiana there was a mass murder of between 100 and 280 people. Federal troops supported those who were murdered. These murders were about a Democratic Party effort to circumvent an election. In order to enforce their will, these terrorists carried out a mass murder. 

This decision gave the green light for racists in the Ku Klux Klan to carry out murders, known as lynchings of thousands of African Americans, as well as people of other nationalities. The federal government refused to prosecute those murders. Therefore the government became complicit  in each and every lynching.    

The Supreme Court ordered that those charged with this mass murder to be freed. Again, we see how the Supreme Court defended the right of states, not only to violate the Constitution, but to carry out mass murder.

Then, there was the Plessey v. Ferguson decision. Here the Supreme Court declared that while Black people had the right to so-called “equality” they could be forced to use separate facilities that were clearly unequal. 

The news media in this country went along with the flagrant violations of the 14th Amendment by the government. This documentary showed how the media actually glorified slavery for many years. Museums and statues that glorified confederate generals were all over the former states. Many of those statues have recently been removed because of mass protests. 

President Woodrow Wilson viewed the film “Birth of a Nation” that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Amend had a film clip of President Donald Trump when he argued, “Bring back Birth of a Nation.”

When we look at this sordid history, we can begin to see why the names Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells were largely unknown in the academic community for many years. To this day, I don’t know of a feature film that portrayed the lives of these two genuinely heroic individuals. To its credit, the documentary Amend featured brief biographies of these two genuine leaders.

While some things changed, much remained the same 

As the political climate changed, actions by the government also changed. First, the Supreme Court, in their Brown v. Board of Education decision, declared that segregation in education is illegal. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both ordered federal troops to escort African American students into the then segregated schools in Arkansas and Georgia. So, here we see that when the government has had the political will, they have forced that will on those who organize to deny Black people citizenship rights. 

Then, the government bowed to the civil rights movement and passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. These laws were mere redundancies of the 14th and 15th Amendments. The government passed these laws because they didn’t want to admit that federal, state and local authorities had been in flagrant violation of the Constitution for close to a century.

However, my high school education in Newark, New Jersey received considerably less funding than the funding of the education of students in more affluent neighborhoods. After many years of litigation, the state court in New Jersey ruled that this discrimination was illegal in their Abbot v. Burke decision. 

As a result, the New Jersey state court ordered the government to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to equalize educational funding in the state. The New Jersey state government got the money for education by raising real estate taxes. In other words, former students, like my old classmates, needed to pay astronomical taxes to fix a system we did not break. 

This kind of litigation didn’t happen in the state of Connecticut. There, the state sentenced Tanya McDowell to five years in prison for “stealing education.” McDowell was a homeless mother who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She used the address of a babysitter to send her son to an upscale Norwalk school. Initially the so-called crime of “steeling education” was a felony. The governor of the state set that aside, and this took two years off McDowell’s five-year prison sentence. 

Today, McDowell is on probation and she has a debt of $6,500 for sending her son to a school in Norwalk. This is a different state of affairs from New Jersey where the state paid hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize inner city schools. By the way, the state of Connecticut is one of the most affluent, per capita, in the nation.

So, we see how routine and vicious racist discrimination, has been a constant feature of the history of this country. The police murders George Floyd, Brianna Taylor and many others underscore this horrendous reality. The massive international protests of those murders also underscore the fact that masses of people are determined to end the political climate that has allowed those murders to happen. 

Other violations of the 14th Amendment

The founding document of the United States was the Declaration of Independence. In their ten-point program the Black Panthers quoted from this document. The Vietnamese government headed by Ho Chi Minh also quoted from this declaration. 

To paraphrase from this Declaration, When there is a “long train of abuses” resulting in “despotism” the people not only have a right, but a “duty” to throw off that power and establish new guards for their “security.”

So, now we can ask the question: If the Black Panthers and the Vietnamese both supported aspects of the Declaration of Independence, why did the United States government use considerable resources to carry out wars against the Panthers and the Vietnamese? 

One of the complaints listed in the Declaration against the British was that the British restricted immigration to the thirteen colonies. The revolutionaries wanted unlimited immigration. People from many nations came to the thirteen colonies to support the revolution against the British. In fact, one of the reasons for the victory of the revolution had to do with the support it received from France. 

All the recent Presidents of this country have made it one of their top priorities to deport millions of immigrants who lived in this country. Most of the deported immigrants came here from Mexico. The Mexican people have a Native American heritage. This means that their ancestors have lived in this part of the world for tens of thousands of years.

Amend also told the story of the Chinese rail workers who endured horrendous conditions to build the transcontinental railroad. That work transformed the United States by opening up a rail line that could go from New York to California in six days. After, the completion of this railroad, the federal government adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese from immigrating to this country.

After the passage of the 14th Amendment, the federal government organized a genocidal war against Native Americans. In all, the government violated about 400 treaties with Native Americans. 

President Andrew Jackson violated a Supreme Court decision, and stole the land of the Cherokee in the area that is now the state of Georgia. Thousands of Cherokee died in the forced march to what was supposed to be their homeland in Oklahoma. President Jackson signed the treaty saying that the Cherokee would have that land “forever.” After the Civil War, the government violated another treaty and stole the Cherokee land in Oklahoma. The government then gave this land to settlers free of charge.

During the Second World War 110,000 Japanese citizens of the United States were placed in concentration camps. Because of a sustained campaign, the government eventually agreed to give each Japanese resident of those concentration camps a check for $20,000. 

One aspect of history that Amend completely overlooked was the decades long struggle by workers in labor unions who demanded a decent standard of living. The 14th Amendment claims that there is supposed to be “equal protection under the law.” 

However, when we look at the history of the labor movement, we see how the police and the National Guard have been consistently used to defend employers, while attacking and even murdering striking workers. There is a direct connection between the labor movement and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that launched the civil rights movement. A leader of that boycott was E.D. Nixon who was a member of the Sleeping Car Porters Union. 

Another Vision – The Russian and Cuban Revolutions

The Russian Revolution

In the year 1917 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled State and Revolution. In that pamphlet, Lenin argued that in the political economic system known as capitalism the state was invented as a “special instrument of repression” to rob workers of the enormous wealth we produce. 

Malcolm X made a similar statement about the United States when he said, “Stop talking about the South, if you’re south of Canada, you’re in the South.”

In my opinion, these clear statements give an excellent summary of the reality of this country. Instead of arguing that the 14th Amendment is a hope or a promise, we can make the statement that the government in this country has always been extremely repressive. The documentary Amend gives a clear history of this.

Lenin wrote another pamphlet where he identified the gross inequality in the world. He called this pamphlet, Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In that pamphlet, Lenin gave the evidence of how industrial cartels were dominating the politics and economics of the capitalist nations in the world. As a result, people were driven to leave their homeland and immigrate to nations where they could make a living. Lenin argued that immigrants were a part of the working class and the Bolsheviks needed to defend their interests. 

Lenin also wrote about the many nations that experienced routine and horrendous repression living under the regime of the Czar. Lenin didn’t argue that the Russian people needed to “hope” that things might get better. No, Lenin argued that the Russian people could only achieve liberation if they joined the struggle to give all those nationalities self-determination. 

Lenin felt that if the Bolsheviks failed to advance that course, the Russian Revolution would have been an impossibility. After the victory of the Russian Revolution, the new name of the nation became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Soviet Union became the first nation in the world to give women the right to vote. The Bolsheviks invited representatives from the colonial nations of the world to the U.S.S.R. to discuss how they might advance their struggles for genuine liberation.

Workers who experienced ruthless repression in the past, took control of their work environment. For a time, there was a cultural and scientific flowering in the Soviet Union in spite of the immense difficulties people experienced in those days. Then, because of the unimaginable difficulties experienced at that time, Joseph Stalin managed to take power and reverse most of the gains of the Revolution. 

The Cuban Revolution

However, the fire of revolution erupted in Cuba. After the Cuban Revolution, the new government organized a literacy drive that succeeded in teaching everyone on the island how to read. This meant that people who had been illiterate could now get skilled jobs and improve their standard of living. People who had little access to health care and education, now had a lifetime right to these services. 

Afro-Cubans and women became fully integrated into the economy. While Cuba made serious errors initially with respect to gays, those errors have been corrected. Instead of merely passing laws to undue the centuries of discrimination, Cuban leaders work with everyone stressing the importance of combatting all forms of discrimination.

Today we can see the results of those efforts. Pennsylvania and Cuba have populations of about 12 and 11 million. While Pennsylvania has had about 24,000 COVID-19 deaths, Cuba has had about 300 COVID-19 deaths. While the Black and Latino communities in this country have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, Cuba is 100% Latino and about 40% Afro-Cuban. Why has there been this dramatic disparity?

No Cuban pays for health insurance. All Cubans have a lifetime right to health care. Cuba has three times more doctors per capita as the United States. Every Cuban neighborhood has their own doctor. This system enabled health care workers to visit every Cuban checking for pandemic related symptoms. Cuba also has a world renown scientific community that has invented treatments and vaccines for COVID-19.

While it is becoming more and more difficult to get abortions in this country, abortion is an absolute right in Cuba. In other words, Cuban women have the right to decide if and when they will become mothers.

Karl Marx

In the year 1848, at a time when there was chattel slavery in the United States, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their Manifesto of the Communist Party. In that document, they identified one of the persistent problems of the capitalist system. This is the crisis of overproduction.

Marx and Engels argued that this problem never existed in human history before capitalism. When Native Americans had more food than they needed, they had a party and celebrated. When there were more auto parts being produced than could be sold, a factory where I worked for fourteen years closed its doors. As a result, 2,500 workers were thrown out, like we were worn out garbage.

Marx continued to look at this problem in his pamphlet Wage, Labor, and Capital. Here Marx wrote about how human labor power produces all wealth, while the owners of capital produce nothing. While workers only receive the means to sustain ourselves, the owners of capital control the enormous wealth workers all over the world produce. When we look at this reality, we can see why capitalist governments will never allow for an environment where there is “equal protection under the law.”

The Pledge of Allegiance

In the documentary Amend, the Pledge of Allegiance was mentioned. In this country, teachers are routinely required to ask students to stand up, place their hands on their hearts, and pledge allegiance to a flag they claim represents liberty and justice for all.

Most people don’t know that Francis Bellamy wrote this Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy’s first cousin was Edward Bellamy who wrote a novel in 1888 titled, Looking Backward. That novel imagined a future socialist world that was based on the idea of human solidarity. In that imaginary future world, poverty and discrimination would no longer be a part of the human experience.

In his original Pledge, Francis Bellamy wrote the words, “I pledge allegiance to my flag.” Francis Bellamy believed that his flag would have liberty, justice, and equality for all. These were the ideas his cousin Edward imagined in his novel Looking Backward. This idea also came to Francis Bellamy from the French phrase adopted after their revolution, liberty, equality, and fraternity. 

However, just about 28 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the word equality was too controversial. At that time, women, Blacks, and Native Americans did not have the right to vote. Apparently, Edward Bellamy became interested in the controversy surrounding this word. So, the title to his sequel to Looking Backward was Equality.

The people who have power in this country have had about 245 years to fulfill their promise of equality along with liberty and justice for all. The history of this country demonstrates that only an international working class movement can liberate humanity from the bondage of capitalism. As Marx and Engels argued “Workers of the world unite!!! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”