Pentecost 2025 in LA: when the masses are seized by the spirit of solidarity

Prelude

• For the unseen workers who clean homes, hospitals, and businesses.
• For the underpaid workers in restaurants, meal delivery services, and parcel delivery companies.
• For the illegal workers in agriculture, slaughterhouses, and construction.
• For the workers who are always ready to flee, for the always fearful illegal immigrants, for the workers who are not seen as human beings.
• For the people whom Moloch sacrifices to turnover, profit, and returns.
• For the people whose blood and sweat Moloch turns into hard cash.
• For the people whom Moloch refuses to pay for their childhood, their education, their illness, their disability, their old age.
• For the people whom Moloch abandons to poison and dust, droughts and floods, tornadoes, and the meat grinder of war.
• For the people whom the Great Molester and Rapist calls “criminals” on the screen.
• For the people whom the Great Slumlord calls “vermin” on the screen.

Present

• For the people in the hood who help each other out in their shared fate.
• For the people in the hood who talk to each other about the threat of deportation.
• For the people in the hood who resist arrest together when deportations happen.
• For the hundreds of people who aren't waiting for deportation anymore, but are actively resisting the hated border troops of ICE.
• For the hundreds of people who besiege ICE with unannounced street demonstrations.
• For the hundreds of people who rain down protests, accusations, stones, and fireworks on ICE.

• Against the Democratic mayor and governor who, by deploying the local police with tear gas and rubber bullets, show which side they are on.
• Against the Democratic mayor and governor who warn Putin's friend that his deployment of the National Guard will turn hundreds of protesters into thousands.
• Against the Democratic mayor and governor who respond to demonstrations of thousands against the National Guard with tear gas and rubber bullets.

• Thousands of demonstrators express their solidarity with their imprisoned comrades in the detention center.
• Thousands of demonstrators rain down protests, accusations, stones, and fireworks on the National Guard.
• After being swept away from the square in front of the detention center by Democratic police brutality, with tear gas and rubber bullets, thousands block the ring road so that tens of thousands will know the story of the struggle.

Interlude

Hear now the voice of Henriette Roland Holst, “Aunt Jet,” from Amsterdam in 1918:

When the mass demonstration on the streets encounters the iron barriers of police brutality and army violence, the mass strike in the factories and factory occupations can continue the struggle much longer. The masses of citizens are transformed into workers who produce the wealth of the entire society, into a productive class with a historical future beyond capitalism and imperialist war.

Hear now the voice of Anton Pannekoek, from Berlin in 1912:

"The proletariat has nothing in common with this competitive need of the bourgeois classes, with their will to nationhood. The nation cannot mean privilege in terms of customers, jobs, or opportunities for work. The capitalists have made this clear from the beginning by importing foreign workers. The reference to this capitalist practice is not primarily an exposure of national hypocrisy, but is mainly intended to make workers realize that under the rule of capitalism, the nation can never mean a labor monopoly for them. And only in exceptional cases does one hear among backward workers—such as among the old American trade union leaders—a desire to restrict immigration."

"In the [wage] struggle, workers of different nationalities are confronted with the same employer. They must wage the struggle as a united front; they experience all its vicissitudes and consequences in the closest community of fate. From their different countries of origin, they have brought with them their national differences, with the primitive individualism of the peasant or the petty bourgeois, and with other bourgeois traditions perhaps also some national consciousness. But all their differences are traditions of the past, opposed to the necessity of standing together now as a united mass, opposed to the need of being a living community of struggle of today. Only one difference has practical significance here, that of language; all information, all proposals and announcements must be conveyed to everyone in their own language. During the last major strike movements in America (such as in the steel factory in McKees Rocks, or in the textile industry in Lawrence), the strikers, who formed a motley mixture of the most diverse nationalities, French, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Syrian, and so on, organized themselves into linguistically separate divisions, whose committees were always in contact with each other and communicated the proposals to each division simultaneously in its own language, thus maintaining the unity of the whole—proof of how, despite the problems of language differences, a close proletarian community of struggle can be established. An attempt to introduce an organizational division between what binds life and struggle, what connects real interests, as separatism wants, is so contrary to reality that it can only succeed temporarily. But this does not only apply to workers in the same factory. In order to wage their struggle successfully, workers throughout the country must unite (...)"

Final plea

• Your story of resistance will go from street to street, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from one city to another.
• Your story of resistance will reach colleagues at work who remember being children of Irish, Polish, Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants.
• Your story of resistance will not be that of Latinos, but of people like themselves, threatened by unemployment, housing shortages, and police brutality.

• May your voice now be heard in Russia by the women, daughters, mothers, and fiancées of the soldiers whom Trump's friend is sending to the meat grinder.
• May your voice now be heard in Ukraine, where neighbors are resisting the dragging of young men off to the front.
• May your voice now be heard in Gaza by the unemployed underground mechanics of Iranian drones and missiles.
• May your voice now be heard by the reservists in Israel who refuse to be sent to the front.
• May your voice now be heard by the too-young miners and child soldiers in Africa, by the millions who toil unseen in misery all over the Earth.

• May the oppressed and exploited, the dehumanized, the nameless, be awakened by your spirit of resistance to the boldness, pride, and glory of an international world proletariat, the bringer of the future of humanity.