LOS ANGELES, CA, February 6—Despite the steady downpour, hundreds of workers rallied outside of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) to demand that the hospital bosses reinstate the life-saving transgender services they have provided for decades. Recognizing the necessity to oppose these blatant attacks on our transgender siblings, a healthcare worker and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member organized coworkers and colleagues to join the planning meeting and support the rally. Though the fightback is in the beginning stages, the issue has sparked more antiracist organizing. We’ve already begun to build relationships with Black workers, providing essential HIV care to our class. Recently, we created a separate chat so that we can specifically to begin having political discussions on how we can advance our work, fighting for our class.While a step in the right direction, workers need to go beyond demanding these bosses give us crumbs back, and unite with their working class family to smash capitalism and bring communism to healthcare and the world! 

Hospital bosses hide their racism and sexism behind Trump’s

We have created a new chat of mostly Black healthcare providers discussing not just Trump’s attacks but also exposing the dangerous role of liberals. The CHLA bosses claim they are simply complying with President Donald Trump’s executive order of stopping the use of puberty blockers, hormones and other gender-affirming care for youth. However, the liberal Democratic Party California Attorney General Rob Bonta already said that the executive order did not give them any basis to yank federal funding and cautioned that these cuts are a form of discrimination.  According to healthcare workers from CHLA, these cuts were not solely done in response to Trump. They have been part of increased scrutiny over their services by the CHLA bosses, who are now using Trump’s order as an excuse to cut out this essential care. 

This protest was organized by the medical resident’s union CIR(SEIU) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Many healthcare workers, and the impacted children and families, showed up in solidarity.  Nevertheless, while DSA city council members Hugo Soto Martinez and Ysabel Jurado joined the rally in support, they sat on a body that voted to increase the police budget (already half of the entire L.A. city budget) by an additional $1 billion.  While they did vote no on the budget increase, their dead reliance on the bosses’ state did nothing to alter the reality that working class Black, Latin, and transgender workers are faced with increased rates of racist and sexist police terror and incarceration.  Moreover, the Democrats only care about trans “rights” insofar as it leads to more bodies in their military as cannon fodder in their plans for future imperialist wars!

Workers chanted, “Protect trans kids!” and hoisted signs that said, “Gender-affirming Care Saves Lives.”   Currently, many of the original comrade’s colleagues work for agencies that have NOT supported the ban on trans healthcare. However, if there are changes to the rules for the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which are a major source of healthcare funding for our patients, then things may change for the worse quickly. 

In L.A., we stand on the shoulders of previous organizers.  From the trans workers who clashed with the LAPD KKKops outside of Cooper’s Donuts in 1959, or like the anti-police brutality protest, nearly 58 years ago to the day, at the Black Cat Tavern, when the entire working class is united against our common enemy, the capitalist class, we cannot be stopped! We’re just getting started but this struggle is one more brick in the layers of class struggle towards communist victory. Join us!J

Washington D.C.

WASHINGTON, D.C., February 2—“We’re all we’ve got, we’re all we need” rang out as 200 angry protesters marched to Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC), demanding that it continue to offer gender-affirming care to trans children. Instead of defying President Donald Trump’s fascist call to end trans care, CNMC issued this statement: “Children’s National is currently pausing all puberty blockers and hormone therapy prescriptions for transgender youth patients, per the guidelines in the Executive Order issued by the White House this week.” D.C. area and Baltimore residents organized and marched within 48 hours to condemn CNMC’s abusive announcement! 
MAGA fascism strikes healthcare

Trump and his billionaire MAGA backers are trashing health care broadly, slashing Medicaid, putting Medicare on the table, shutting down HIV treatment and education by the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. and in Africa, and backing state restrictions on both surgical and medical abortions. The attack on trans care for children is just the beginning, the camel’s nose under the tent. This flagrant attack on the working class is designed to reduce government spending, terrify workers and students, intensify racist conditions, and put more money in the hands of the billionaire ruling class. 

Our bold action was a powerful grassroot-organized action initiated by Baltimore residents who had been protecting libraries and programs featuring LGBTQ messages. The march was led by a friend of the Baltimore West Wednesday Coalition (in which Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members participate) that has held weekly police brutality protests for over 10 years (CHALLENGE, March 29). A PLP member documented the CNMC protest for social media sites to help spread the struggle.

Meanwhile, the lying hospital administrators, lackeys of ruling class financiers all, told hospital workers that we were a MAGA rally that they should ignore!  Such disinformation and efforts to minimize the extent of the residents’ anger are part of the hospital’s playbook to defuse solidarity of hospital workers with their patients.

Hospital bosses also pushing anti-immigrant racism

The battle is broader, not just in the D.C.-Baltimore corridor, and not only in health care. Hospitals are refusing to defend patients who are undocumented immigrants. New York University Hospital and Johns Hopkins Hospital administrations have explicitly told doctors and staff not to hide their patients from ICE and not even tell patients when ICE stormtroopers have come onsite. But hospital workers and med students are pushing back and hatching resistance approaches in hospitals to defend all workers needing health care, documented or not!

The storm of the working class is beginning to gather. PLP is fanning the flames of revolt and will lead the way to communist revolution and a system where the needs of all workers of all races, genders, and nationalities are fully met and capitalism abolished for all time.

We are witnessing a massive turn to right-wing, anti-worker, racist, and sexist onslaughts not just in the U.S. but all over the world. Even the bourgeois (pro-ruling class) mass media openly discuss it. Why is this happening?

This worldwide turn  is due to the betrayal of the USSR as the vanguard of the world’s working class. The USSR was once the inspiration for and major supporter of socialist revolution. 

Liberating workers from capitalism

The Bolshevik (Russian) Revolution of 1917 was the central event of world history! For the first time ever, the exploited and oppressed – workers and peasants – took state power from the exploiters, and held onto it! 

The Bolsheviks created the Third Communist International – the “Comintern” — and it spread communist parties in every country and colony. Headquartered in Moscow the Comintern inspired, organized, and supported workers’ struggles for reforms, against colonialism, and for revolution against capitalism. 

The world’s capitalists hated the Soviet Union and the Comintern. They worried that revolution would spread. They feared their own working classes! So they aided the Italian fascists and the German Nazis, encouraging Adolf Hitler to attack the Soviet Union.
Joseph Stalin had led the USSR and the world communist movement through its heroic era. Under Bolshevik leadership the USSR:
 collectivized agriculture, abolishing the feudal small-peasant farming that caused devastating famines every 3 – 5 years (4 famines in the 1920s alone) led a crash program of industrialization that transformed the devastated Russia of the 1920s into the industrial powerhouse of the 1930s, making possible the defeat of the Nazis armies during World War II 

It was the Red Army of the Soviet Union that smashed the racist, fascist hordes of Hitler and his allies during World War II. In countries under fascist occupation communists were the biggest force in the underground resistance movements for freedom. 

By the post-war period of 1945 – 1953 the working classes, poor peasants, and many others throughout the world looked to the Soviet Union and the world communist movement to build a socialist world and lead them to communism in the near future. Then the advance of communism stopped.

Revisionists betray the revolution

The open betrayal began during the 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev became the Soviet leader after the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953. Khrushchev stated that revolution by the working class was no longer the program of the CPSU and whatever world communist movement it was still leading.

This turn towards nationalism and reform and away from internationalism and revolution was sharply criticized by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong in the famous Sino-Soviet dispute. During the mid-60s a huge mass movement in China called the Great Proletarian Communist Revolution attacked reformists inside the Chinese Communist Party.

But by 1969 this left movement had been defeated. Since then there has been no international movement organizing workers and others for communist revolution – except for our party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).

For the past 55 years the capitalist class has been free to attack the working class in every country. Labor unions and workers’ organizations have become totally reformist and politically pro-capitalist.  

At the same time the capitalist class, all over the world, has stepped up its violence and exploitation. Gone are the days of the 1930s and ‘40s when capitalists, fearful of the communist example, grudgingly allowed concessions to workers and gave in to antiracist and anti-sexist demands. 

Therefore, the worldwide anti-working-class turn is due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement as inspiration and example of struggle against capitalist exploitation in the short run and for communist revolution in the long run.
The most important question facing the working class of the world is this: WHY did the glorious communist movement of the 20th century turn into its opposite? 

Assessing what worked and what didn’t

We in PLP have evaluated the successes and the failures of the world communist movement of the 20th century. We continue to  do so, basing our analysis on study and on our own experience in the fight for revolution.

We fight for communism immediately, according to Karl Marx’s stirring words: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

No privileges for anyone. In particular, no privileges for communist party members – a concession to capitalism that undermined the Soviet and Chinese struggles for communism.

Everyone must work for the welfare of the whole class, not for themselves and family only. 

Everyone must fight racism, sexism, anti-gay discrimination, and any and all ideas that divide or harm the working class. 

We embrace internationalism, the fight of all workers in all countries. We fight for communist revolution everywhere. 

No borders: We welcome all who are willing to join the struggle for communism. 

Here are some of our key documents. All available at http://plp.org

Road to Revolution III (1971). Here we summarize the great achievements of the communist movement and analyze the reasons for its tragic collapse.

Road to Revolution IV (1982). We set forth PLP’s outline of how we must organize communist society differently.

For Communist Economics and Communist Power (1982) is a discussion document that expands on Road to Revolution IV.

Dark Night Shall Have Its End (2015) Here we outline the crisis facing the world’s working class and how we must have the courage and tenacity to struggle and overcome it no matter how long it takes.

We are confident that the working class will win and build communism. Join us!

NEW YORK CITY, February 7—Retired  Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and teachers inside United Federation of Teachers (UFT) continue to expand our Party’s work, turning our decisive upset in last year’s union election into the Retired Teachers’ Chapter (RTC)—70,000 retirees!—into part of a movement to build workers’ power. Nurturing antiracist connections—between retired and active workers, union and non-union, documented and undocumented, workers and youth—is vital to demonstrate how intimately our interests are CONNECTED, and a key part of our strategy in building a working-class movement for an egalitarian, communist world.  

Expanding our fight, and our limits

While the health care fight that inspired our victory—the backroom deal that attempted to privatize/cut our retiree health benefits (what we call Medicare “Disadvantage”)—continues to be our focus, in a few short months, our movement has expanded considerably.
For years, the union (mis)leadership meticulously cultivated a passive role for retired workers inside the union. They’ve curried favor with a small coterie of retirees, just enough to get their votes and acquiescence for union-wide policies that went against our interests and hurt the working class. With our new leadership, we have already succeeded in turning that opportunism on its head. Instead of sparsely attended union meetings with bureaucrats droning on about meaningless drivel and stifling any opposition, attendance has soared and meetings have become marked by open discussion and debate on important issues of the day. 

We have already leveraged resolutions passed in the RTC and brought them to the union-wide Delegate Assembly, where they have passed by overwhelming margins (no longer held back by bribed retiree delegates). This has reduced the old leadership caucus to either embarrassing catcalling from the sidelines or jumping on the bandwagon and trying to claim credit after the fact.

Building workers solidarity one action at a time

This transition has not been without contradictions, and we should have no illusions working inside the mass movement. When a retiree raised a resolution supporting striking Amazon workers—a pro-worker and antiracist action supported by 80 percent of the body—the new leadership failed to bring the motion to a vote, sending the message that Amazon workers “aren’t that important.” But PLP members have been working to build commitment and capacity to follow through on such plans, and we did successfully organize multiple Amazon support actions before and during the strike, and our criticisms lay the basis for future struggle.

One important new initiative inside the RTC is a Labor Solidarity Committee, which has attracted scores of members and led to two successful actions in only a month. We have also created a “Self-Education” study group that aims to educate ourselves and others on labor history.

Build retired/in-service alliances and student-teacher-parent unity!

The fascist immigration crackdown has generated the desired racist terror in immigrant, working class communities, but also a tremendous desire among workers inside our union to fight back! Many retired and in-service teachers and workers in the community have been attending training and meetings to strategize. We have a great opportunity right now to unite these forces and show the power of our line of student-teacher-parent unity: inside the schools, in the communities, and in the unions! 

Smash capitalism—Join PLP!

The lesson of this fascist crackdown is that the whole capitalist system has got to go! The liberal (big) fascists ushered in this period by covering up capitalism’s violent and exploitative nature with the fig-leaf of “democracy.” The exploitation of immigrants; imperialist foreign policies in places like Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine; destruction of the environment: these are SYSTEMIC problems of capitalism. Workers have been fooled into supporting Trump precisely because the liberals have provided no answers to workers’ needs. Capitalism HAS no answers for workers, only bosses’ profit interests. Workers of all stripes MUST learn this crucial lesson and help build a movement that CAN finally answer our needs. That movement is COMMUNISM, where all wealth is shared, where exploitation, racism, and sexism are against the law. Where the bosses’ borders become archeological ruins of a failed system and the immense potential of workers and youth is unleashed for the common good. 

We in PLP have a crucial role to play. We must continue to wage class struggle, push for our line inside these mass organizations, and lead numbers of workers into our movement, into our Party! We must show this newspaper to our friends and co-workers and write for the paper about our experiences. If we care about our world, we must become professional revolutionaries committed to saving our planet for human life. It’s that simple.

BOSTON, February 4—At a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) agents have been sighted across the city terrifying workers and detaining them at grocery stores and subway stations, members and friends of Progressive Labor Party joined together to tell ICE, “Stay out of our community!”

Immigrants welcome, racists, never!

Five of us met after work in the center of a Boston neighborhood to sell CHALLENGE and distribute leaflets in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole about the ongoing fascist attack on immigrants. Once upon a time, this neighborhood was a key destination for Irish and Greek immigrants settling in Boston. Today, 25 percent of the population is Latin, and over 10 percent are not U.S. citizens.

We chose a busy corner in front of the local community center, shouting chants such as, “Smash racist deportations, working people have no nations!” There was a local nonprofit distributing food to workers nearby, and we made sure each of the nonprofit workers got a copy of our flyer. We also discussed with them how we can begin distributing food to immigrant workers who are so terrified of ICE that they have stopped going to work or to the grocery store. 

This is part of a new Progressive Labor Party (PLP) campaign to fight racist deportations in our local area. President Donald Trump has a hit list of cities for ICE to raid which includes Boston. Our campaign will focus on organizing workers in the neighborhood to fight back against ICE agents. We will hold social events, hold regular CHALLENGE distributions, and support families as needed with regards to intimidation by ICE. 

We plan to have a protest in March to show our solidarity and support to our immigrant working class brothers and sisters. We plan to coordinate our agitation with other Boston neighborhoods as well as members of the Boston Teachers Union to protect the identities of Boston school children and their families.

As it stands now, Boston is a Sanctuary City and our schools and city are supposed to be safe from ICE. But it is clear we can’t depend on these formalities or liberal politicians. The safety that we have enjoyed so far was fought for by workers and students during the last Trump Administration, and if we want to keep these victories, we will need to keep fighting while building the movement for communism.

Our leaflet, which was written collectively, focuses on building an understanding of how both Democrats and Republicans and all capitalists are using racism against Black and brown newly arrived immigrants to divide and conquer workers and pit workers against each other.  The only solution is multiracial unity focused on destroying the capitalist system and replacing it with communism. It has never been as important for the PLP to take a leadership role in winning workers—we have a world to win!