by Christian Gomez
On the evening of August 14, 2017, a mob of protesters surrounded the Confederate Soldiers Monument located in front of the Old Durham County Courthouse in Durham, North Carolina. Amidst the repeated chanting “We, We are the revolution” and “No Cops, No K.K.K., no fascist U.S.A,” a female, later identified as Takiyah Fatima Thompson, 22, climbed atop of a ladder and slung a yellow rope around the torso of the statue. As the chants intensified, the monument was yanked from its base collapsing on the courthouse grounds before the cheering crowd.
In the days that followed, authorities also tracked down and arrested Thompson, Dante Emmanuel Strobino, 35; Ngoc Loan Tran, 24; and Peter Hull Gilbert, 39, for their role in illegally toppling the statue. All four suspects were members of the Workers World Party (WWP), a hardline communist organization dedicated to the overthrow of American capitalism, abolishing police, and fervently committed to socialist world revolution. Their website, Workersworld-party.org, describes the WWP as a “revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party dedicated to organizing and fighting for a socialist revolution in the United States and around the world.” Their online description further states: “We are active in the Black Lives Matter movement including advocating for disarming the police and other repressive state apparatus.”
The WWP was founded on February 12, 1959, when five former members of the Socialist Workers Party — Sam Marcy, Vincent Copeland, Jack Wilson, Ronald Jones, and Dorothy Flint — issued the following statement expressing their disillusion with the SWP:
We were the proletarian left wing of the Socialist Workers Party. We have now split with that party, which has gone farther and farther to the right in recent years, so that we can openly fight for orthodox Trotskyism, which is the authentic Marxism-Leninism of today.
Mingling with Tyrants & Terrorists
Since its founding, the WWP has been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and militantly defended Ho Chí Minh and the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam. Today, the WWP continues to praise and defend the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Communist Cuba, the Nicolás Maduro dictatorship of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and even the totalitarion Soviet-style regime of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
Of Belarus, Ottis Grotewohl notes, in an article published in the August 20, 2020 issue of Workers World, “Unlike the other former Soviet Republics, Belarus displays symbolism of the former Soviet Union (USSR).” Grotewohl reminds the Workers Worlds’ primarily communist readers, “The only political party that Lukashenko ever belonged to was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
Lukashenko is the first and only president elected in Belarus since the structural demise of the USSR, having been first elected in 1994 and subsequently reelected in every presidential election since with questionably large pluralities of the electorate. Grotewohl points out that “Despite the capitalist counterrevolution in 1991, Belarus was able to restore some of the socialist programs of the Soviet era.” In other words the Soviet-system never truly collapsed in Belarus, and the WWP’s newspaper wants to keep it that way, with Grotewohl concluding his article: “U.S. imperialist and fascist hands off Belarus!”
The WWP has mingled with totalitarian despots and regimes around the world, including sending a delegation to meet with officials of the repressive Communist Party of Cuba, on October 1-15, 2017. On April 12, 2017, a WWP delegation attended a reception honoring the 105th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s first brutal dictator Kim Il Sung that was hosted by the UN Mission of the DPRK in New York City. And in 2014, the WWP sent a delegation to a conference in Moscow hosted by the Anti-Globalisation Movement of Russia that included representatives from both the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Russian Communist Workers Party — the ideological successors of the murderous Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
And according to an ideological summary of the WWP, written by Deirdre Griswold, the long-time editor of the Workers World newspaper (the official propaganda organ of the WWP), while she was in Havana, Cuba, in July 1972, the WWP admits to having “developed warm working relationships” with various overseas terrorist organizations, including the Arab Liberation Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Arab Gulf, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In December 2017, the WWP sent and published a statement of solidarity with the PFLP on the 50th anniversary of the terrorist outfit’s founding. “Workers World Party salutes the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on the 50th anniversary of your foundation. We honor the memory of Dr. George Habash and Abu Ali Mustafa, Ghassan Kanafani, Muhammad Al Aswad, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh and so many other comrades martyred in the cause of liberation. They are heroes and inspirations not only for the people of Palestine but for the workers and oppressed all over the world,” the WWP stated.
Dr. George Habash was an Arab nationalist and Palestinian physician who founded the PFLP in 1967 as an ideologically Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization dedicated to the “liberation” and establishment of a secular state of Palestine. Habash is also credited with exporting modern terrorism from the Middle East to Europe for the first time, when he sent his commandos into Western Europe and hijacked El Al Flight 426 on route from Rome to London, on July 23, 1968.
In its solidarity statement, the WWP also called for the release of convicted terrorist and PFLP Secretary-General Ahmad Sa’adat, who is currently serving a 30-year sentence in Israel for his role in the PFLP’s assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi, killed on October 17, 2001.
The WWP emphatically stated in its solidarity message to the PFLP, “We call for the freedom of Comrade Ahmad Sa’adat and all political prisoners held in the dungeons of the racist settler state in Palestine,” referring to Israel.
“Justified” Violence
As far as the WWP is concerned, violence against those whom they label as “imperialists,” “racists,” and “fascists” is both justified and responsible. It even glorifies those who commit such acts as praiseworthy “revolutionaries.” In his defense of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, WWP founder Sam Marcy said the following about the use of violence:
The Marxist view of violence distinguishes between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses. Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.
Speaking about the recent anti-police riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd, perennial WWP presidential candidate Monica Moorehead reiterated Marcy’s quote in a call for “revolution.” In an article entitled “Against police violence and capitalism to rebel is justified,” published in the June 4, 2020 issue of the Workers World, Moorehead begins her article praising the recent wave of violence and mob-rioting in Minneapolis and elsewhere throughout the United States; she writes:
Workers World salutes all the brave protesters in Minneapolis, currently ground zero against police terror. We also salute those activists in Los Angeles, Memphis and other cities who are organizing protests and braving the pandemic to be in the streets or in car caravans to show solidarity with the demand: Justice for George Floyd and all victims of police violence.
Moorehead concludes emphatically stating that such violence against the people is actually “self-defense” and “justified.” She writes:
As Marcy emphasizes, any spontaneous or unorganized violence from the oppressed is self-defense against the organized armed force of the state. […] However any oppressed community sees fit to fight back against legal and extralegal terrorism—be it the police or neofascists— alongside mainly antiracist white youth, is justified.
Another means by which the WWP agitates for violence and socialist revolution is through its various front organizations, which through the decades have included the American Serviceman’s Union; All-People’s Congress; Committee to Support Middle East Liberation; People’s Anti-War Mobalization; A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition; Youth Against War & Fascism; Prisoner’s Solidarity Committee; Party for Socialism and Liberation, which split off from the WWP in 2004; and Peoples Power Assembly, which coordinates through local WWP offices.
According to a study prepared by the House Committee on Internal Security entitled “The Workers World Party and Its Front Organizations,” published in April 1974, “One of the Workers World Party’s most important front organizations is the Prisoners Solidarity Committee.” As of August 28, 2020, the Prisoners Solidarity Committee Facebook page, operated by the WWP’s Reece Evans, states: “The of Workers World Party believes that U.S. prisons are concentration camps for the poor and are a part of the systematic system of racism promoted by U.S. capitalism.”
The WWP created the Prisoners Solidarity Committee (PSC) just prior to the Attica Prison uprising, in which an estimated 2,200 inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica, New York, rioted and seized control of the prison, on September 9 through 13, 1971. During the uprising, inmates took 42 correctional officers and other prison staff as hostages. Of the Attica rebellion, the PSC states on their Facebook page, “Tom Soto, a representative of the Prisoners Solidarity Committee was asked by the prisoners to be part of a delegation in discussions with the prison administration,” adding that the PSC was “a strong voice for the prisoners and in those very early days promoted the idea ‘Tear the Walls Down! Prisons are Concentration Camps for the Poor.’”
More recently, WWP/PSC also organized a protest in support of the prison uprising at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna, Delaware, in 2017. There, prisoners seized control of Building C — which housed 100 inmates — and took five correctional officers as hostages. Fueling prison uprisings and radicalizing them in Marxist-Leninist revolution, the WWP offers free subscriptions of its propaganda newspaper Workers World to all prisoners in the United States. The WWP/PSC and Workers World openly call for releasing Americas’s entire prison population.
Number seven on the WWP’s list of 10 “Socialist Demands for the Covid-19 Crisis” states: “Empty prisons and detention centers. Shut down ICE. End racist attacks.” Of the seventh demand, Monica Moorehead argues that released prisoners should instead be housed in vacant hotel rooms, condos, and luxury apartments at the taxpayers’ expense, and that they be eligible for unemployment and other taxpayer-funded government benefits. In her article entitled “Why We Say Free Them All!” (Originally published on April 14, 2020 on Workers.org), Moorehead demands:
Released prisoners should be treated like the millions of other people being impacted by the pandemic. Their health should be cared for. Community groups should be funded by local and state governments to organize housing for prisoners in empty hotels and abandoned housing. Food should be distributed to them instead of sitting on grocery shelves and rotting. These prison workers should be eligible for unemployment benefits!
The demand to release all incarcerated criminals coupled with their belief that violence against police is “justified” would lead to a violent Bolshevik-style communist revolution in America, threatening the internal security of the United States and the very lives of the American people. According to Workers World editor Deirdre Griswold, the WWP “believes that the struggle between the two basic classes in society — monopoly capital and the proletariat — is irreconcilable, and can only be ended with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the socialist reconstruction of society.” (Emphasis added.) WWP Executive Committee member Scott Williams declares in his article, entitled “What Road to Socialism” (posted on Workers.org on December 6, 2019): “Resistance to capitalism and oppression, led by revolutionary communist organizations with deep connections in the masses, is the route to socialism.”
Williams also went on to praise how the WWP’s 2016 presidential and vice presidential candidates, Monica Moorehead and Lamont Lilly respectively, “raised demands such as abolishing the police and Immigration Customs and Enforcement, and dismantling the Pentagon.” He added, how they “addressed the Black Lives Matter movement in a way that no other campaign did.” Williams concluded his screed with the following ultimatum: “Build a Workers World! Socialism or death.”
Borrowing a phrase from the murderous Chinese Communist despot Mao Tse Tung, who referred to his enemies as “paper tigers” — “unable to withstand the wind and rain,” authors Vincent Taccetta and Makasi Motema wrote in an article entitled “The Coming Decade of Revolution,” published in the January 16, 2020 issue of Workers World: “Both at home and abroad, U.S. military and police are paper tigers. When faced with the winds of popular anger and the rain of organized resistance, they will wilt and crumble like wet pulp.”
The WWP is certainly not the only Marxist-Leninist, communist party in the United States; however, it is one of the most prominent at the forefront and organizing much of the civil unrest and lawlessness permeating the country. It would behoove local police departments and sheriff’s offices to pay closer attention to WWP’s subversive activities. While America may not actively be at war against communism, communists, such as the WWP, have made it abundantly clear that they are indeed actively at war against America and will not rest until they have achieved communism.
Initial takeaways:
• On May 16, 2001, then-Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations Louis J. Freeh named the Workers World Party (WWP) as a “domestic terrorist group” representing “a potential threat in the United States.”
•Originally split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1959 as a pro-Trotsky “revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party dedicated to organizing and fighting for a socialist revolution in the United States and around the world.”
•WWP is heavily active in Antifa, which President Trump tweeted would be designated as a “terrorist organization.” And according to its website Workerworld-party.org, WWP is also “active in the Black Lives Matter movement.”
• Internationally, the WWP vehemently defends and pledges solidarity with Marxist-Leninist foreign governments and terrorist organizations.
• In addition to calling for abolishing the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the United States Armed Forces, WWP actively supports prison riots and demands the release of all incarcerated criminals.
• The national office headquarters of the WWP are located in New York City, with additional branches in Atlanta; Austin; the Bay Area; Boston; Buffalo, New York; Charlotte; Cleveland; Dallas; Durham, North Carolina; Houston; Knoxville, Tennessee; Minneapolis; Pensacola, Florida; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake City; San Antonio; San Diego; Tuscan, Arizona; Washington, D.C.; and in West Virginia.