The following letters are from PL’ers and friends who attended the rally

After the Hands-Off March on Saturday, an interesting debate sparked among our friends. Some people were so happy that people were standing up to Trump and can’t wait to get back to the way things were with the Democrats (who we call the Big Fascists. Please check out the glossary on page 6). Others were mad and didn’t go to the march because they saw that the march was actually sponsored by the Big Fascists in the Democratic Party and was supporting, among other things, the arch imperialists in NATO, and keeping the Gaza genocide on the sidelines. Some people now use the term “controlled resistance” for how the ruling class attempts to control the uprisings of the workers. They see the danger of this kind of event “quietly pushing people into trusting the same systems that cause harm.”

My wife and I, both in subsequent rallies and in online group chats, have been telling people that we don’t have to agree with everything we see and hear, and we think a lot about the reasons for the way things are, and the motivations of people. 

It was really good that so many people turned out to these rallies all over the country. We should not take that fact lightly. Do they have our line? Not yet! But as much as we criticize the leadership of it , we can expect at all times that the ruling class wants to control the working class, even when we fight back! But we need to be there, in the heart of it, and struggling with our fellow workers to see the big picture, and distributing our literature and building for our events. “We gotta be in it to win it!” 

Going collectively helps us concentrate our forces for sure. In our small group of teachers, we were still able to lead chants with hundreds of people that sharpened the politics of the march and inspired many people around us. We also had deeper conversations with a bunch of people, and interested several friends to come march with Progressive Labor Party (PLP) on May Day! Being with so many folks who want change and who show up and march and chant in the street is powerful. That’s the collective power of the working class! 

This is a very exciting time to be alive. And truly, right now, EVERYTHING we do counts. We have the capacity to bend the arc of history. And there is also great danger that failure to act will have dire consequences for the international working class.  If we aim to change the world, now is not the time for pessimism; now is the time to step up, to lock into the struggle! We have a lot of work to do and not a moment to waste. Forward to communist victory!
*

As a member of my Unitarian Church group’s Immigrant Rights Committee, we sent three cars of people to Raleigh North Carolina’s participation in Anti-Trump National Protest, in downtown Raleigh by state buildings. There were workers from every background, young, old, men, women, and multiracial. There was so much antiracism present. While the Party would disagree, (and rightly so) with the reformist, dead end politics of the speakers, the North Carolina workers know Trump is a fascist, but what many don’t know  (yet) is that capitalism produces fascism. North Carolina  is feeling the layoffs of federal workers; there are small groups of immigrant farmworkers in North Carolina who are afraid to work out of fear of ICE, and this is right out of Nazi playbook. ICE raids are racist. The working class now more than ever needs communism, and a fighting organization, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to lead to communist revolution to end fascism once and for all
*

The wave of Hands Off rallies on April 5 confirmed that where there is oppression, there will be fightback. Across the country several hundred thousand people came out to shout No! to attacks on our trade union rights, our Social Security, our health care, on our fellow federal workers who make these programs work, and on the science that creates vaccines.

Demonstrators packed twenty blocks of Manhattan. They filled the plaza in front of Oakland, California city hall. They rallied in cities big and small. The anger no longer respects the usual political dividing lines. It has erupted in districts where voters tried Trump after suffering the Democrats’ inflation. Republican congresspersons have been shouted down at their town halls. In an Oregon county that went 68 percent for Trump, the crowd shouted, “Tax Elon,” “Tax the wealthy,” “Tax the rich,” and “Tax the billionaires.” When a representative in Indiana mentioned Social Security “adjustments,” a roar of protest silenced her.

Rallies in some smaller cities and around particular schools and workplaces were militant about fighting ICE raids. When people know each other in daily work, they see their common humanity and respond.

The April 5 events were called by Indivisible, a fake mass organization run by Democratic Party operatives. The executive director was previously a policy man for a Democratic congressperson. Indivisible did all it could to make “democracy” the theme of the rallies, the liberal capitalist alternative to open fascism. Its plan is to repeat rallies like April 5 until the 2026 elections.

But the capitalist republic of the last 250 years is broken for good. There is no going back. Whatever happens to Trump, the ruling capitalist class can no longer work out their problems with constitutional politeness. Their solution for working people is more suffering, more insecurity, and war against other imperialists. The only way out is forward to communism, a state of the working class, by the working class, and for the working class.Together we will replace capitalist oppression with communist liberation.
*