Truth About Thanksgiving here ♦ Celebrate and Learn from Our Revolutionary History here ♦
LOS ANGELES (US), November 4— Almost four hundred students at two different high schools gladly took Red Flag this week. Previous attempts at one school to intimidate students seem to have backfired. We ran out of leaflets and Red Flags. We’ll be back next time with more papers. We encourage young people to share our communist ideas with their teachers, parents, and classmates. Youth have played a key role in mass revolutionary movements. Armed with communist ideas, when they become workers and soldiers, they can put an end to capitalist racism and exploitation and imperialist genocide forever.
Thanksgiving: Genocide and Nationalism
“I look forward to seeing you on Thanksgiving,” said a family member. “My idea is to make it a mini-history experience, with costumes, foods, and cooking as it may have been done then.”
Thanksgiving is a US federal holiday, instituted during the US Civil War. It celebrates the lie that Pilgrim colonists and Indigenous Wampanoag people of Massachusetts celebrated a peaceful harvest festival in 1621.
“I teach that history,” I
responded. “It’s hard to explain genocide to children. It’s better not to pretend that the Pilgrims and
Indigenous people were friends. Let’s stick to family and good food.”
Red Flag readers who grew up in the United States were taught this lie. They may know about the genocidal wars fought by colonial rulers in Massachusetts and throughout the Americas. They may know about the Pequot War of 1637. That’s when hundreds of Indigenous people were burned alive in the Mystic Massacre, and the survivors sold into slavery in Barbados. The colonial rulers held a “Thanksgiving” celebration after this massacre.
The students in my US history classes who know about this
genocide have also been taught to condemn “settler colonialism.” They see it as separate from capitalism, as if all settlers were rich and entitled. They had never been taught about the class struggle between the colonial rulers and the masses of impoverished colonists brought to North America to be the laborers and shock troops in this genocide.
English peasants were forced off the land by “enclosures” that converted farmland to sheep farming for capitalist textile production. They flooded into the cities where they were forced to turn to begging and thieving to survive. The English rulers saw the colonies as a place where the hungry, angry masses could serve the purposes of imperialism.
Two thirds of settlers during the colonial period came as indentured laborers, serving terms of servitude usually of seven years. They often worked side-by-side with the first African captives and rebelled and ran away from their masters
together. They were subject to harsh discipline, and often ran away to Indigenous communities. In Virginia, 40% of the indentured servants died before their term of indenture was completed.
The true history of the colonial period includes multi-racial unity of oppressed European laborers, African laborers who were by 1705 sentenced to lifetime slavery, and the Indigenous communities that welcomed runaways, African and European. It has nothing to do with the phony history of genocidal
Pilgrims sitting down with Wampanoag people 403 years ago to share a meal.
When we know history, we can see the basis for a united working-class fight for a communist world where we will truly be able to sit down together and share the fruits of our labor.
—Red teacher in the US
Celebrate and Learn from Our Revolutionary History
“Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Russian Revolution,” I announced to about thirty friends at a weekly protest against the Gaza genocide. “This is an excellent week to be talking about revolution. Talk to me if you’d like to come to dinner at my place Friday to do that.”
Almost everyone already had copies of Red Flag. Four people wanted details about the dinner. “We should have a teach-in so you can tell us all about it,” another said.
Five of us (not all from the protest group) made it to the dinner meeting. Several others really wanted to come but couldn’t.
“We have to be skeptical about the sources pushing anti-communist propaganda,” a friend said.
I started by asking what everyone knew about the Bolshevik (communist) revolution of 1917 and what they wanted to know. Almost nobody knew anything. One activist knew that so many soldiers and workers stormed the Winter Palace that the guards ran away.
“I don’t trust anything they told me about it in school,” another remarked.
So, I summarized: Who the Bolsheviks were. How they worked clandestinely for many years, especially in the factories and the military. The ups and downs. How the fight sharpened, when world war broke out, between national chauvinism and the communist line that “workers should never kill workers in the capitalists’ wars.” Imperialist intervention in the bloody civil war between “White” (capitalist) and “Red” (communist) Russians. The great victory: proving that workers could take and hold power.
And the biggest mistakes: Mobilizing masses to fight for “Peace, Land, Bread” and later for socialism, instead of for communism. Ending “war communism” with the capitalist “New Economic Policy” (NEP). How the NEP and then socialism turned communists into a new class of state capitalists.
There were many questions. What was the importance of the world war to the revolution? What were the “soviets”? When was the “USSR” formed to incorporate workers of non-Russian nationalities? They were happy to see the article series we produced on the centennial of the revolution.
The conversation continued for several hours. It turned toward communist revolutionary strategy today. I suggested organizing a study group to discuss some of the key issues on which ICWP has a line different from 20th century communist movements and from many groups active today. Why communism, not socialism. Revolution, not reform. Why we reject the program of “national liberation” and the slogan of “the right of nations to self-determination.” Why we focus on organizing industrial workers and soldiers. There was interest but it will take more work to get it going.
Meanwhile, this dinner/discussion extended and deepened relationships among a group of friends who mostly hadn’t known each other before. “Thank you so much for inviting me,” one said warmly.
Events like these will continue and grow. We must learn as much as we can from the heroic communists who came before us.
—Comrade in California (USA)
See Our Series on the History of the Bolshevik Revolution here