PHOTO/BRETT JELINEK
Richard Monje is Vice President of Workers United. He was master of ceremonies at the Chicago memorial for Nelson Peery, a revolutionary for over 75 years, who died in September, 2015. He gave these closing remarks.
CHICAGO, IL — Nelson touched people on so many different levels. I’ve seen him with children. I’ve seen him with families, not just with comrades who bring their children around. He would be on a bus or a plane, and he’d immediately make friends and keep in contact and continue a conversation. He touched people in so many ways.
I met him when I was like 18-years-old, after the walk-outs, after the Chicano moratorium, and after I’d been shot by police in the back of the leg and was angry on so many levels at what had happened in East L.A. over that period of time. Our community, my family, people who look like me, were being terrified, harassed by the police walking back from playing baseball at the playground. And to go from that to the thought that the principle strategy for revolution in this country is based in class was very profound for me.
Where we find ourselves today is in a growing revolutionary movement, not a movement of reforms and extracting concessions from capitalism. Will they adjust the capitalist system to feed the poor? To help the children? To create places for the mentally ill to go? To take care of our elderly, our disabled? Will they take care of the growing impoverishment of the working class?
Everything has been broadened out to a different level, and there’s a task placed before those of us who are enlightened about what’s right and what’s wrong. Will we go back to having orphans living in the streets? Is it acceptable to us, whether we’re revolutionary communists or just individuals, to turn away children who are starving? Whether or not we’re communists, it’s become a practical question: how do we save our country? It’s not ideological. You must come forward and do what is necessary, and enter that stage of understanding, of self-consciousness: what are you going to do?
I barely made it. I owe my life to a lot of the communists in this room and to Nelson. I was once on the border of going to jail or getting hooked on drugs. How many people around us face that today as the only alternative to surviving the growing misery they feel in their families and communities? Let alone the murders that are going on. We have union members in St. Louis whose children grew up with Michael Brown in Ferguson. This is not just something that’s isolated to certain small communities as it once was. It’s widespread across this country.
So the question comes to us: what are you going to do? And are you going to let your ideas, your individual opinions keep you divided when our entire history is one of banding together, fighting together, not individually, not without organization, but with organization and discipline! That’s the only way we change this country and this world, and you must step up! Thank you.
