Bronx actions against racist terror
In the last month our Antiracist Coalition has been on the move. Almost 40 strong, we marched on the 50th Precinct, decrying their indifference to nooses and semi-automatic assault rifles found in and near Van Cortlandt Park, as well as their brutal assaults against a young Black suspect. We also demanded that no more cops be sent as first responders to calls for people in mental crisis. This provoked a huge "Blue Lives Matter" mobilization in the park days later.  We were noticed!
We were invited to speak at a Climate Justice rally at Manhattan College and detailed how centuries of capitalist agribusiness have exacerbated climate catastrophes and pandemics.
These horrors deliver racist oppression upon front-line workers who are affected worst and who are giving strong leadership in the fightback against capitalist terror, like at Standing Rock. The participants were mainly students and some faculty. Two indicated that they would like to do consistent organizing with us.
Finally, we helped to organize a vigil for justice for Breonna Taylor at a Riverdale traffic circle. Streams of rush hour travelers honked their horns in support! We met two Professional Staff Congress union members who want to work with us as well.
We fight. We grow!
*****
Belarus solidarity
I wanted to take the opportunity to express solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of workers and students who have been continually taking to the streets in Belarus over the past two months. They are risking arrest, torture, and even death in their protests against the corrupt and reactionary government of Alexander Lukashenko.
But even as I applaud their boldness, I’m forced to think about  how capitalism tries to force the working-class everywhere to pick sides in these “lose-lose” fights, and how we can best support them as an international communist party.
Obviously they have every reason to reject a boss like Lukashenko, an authoritarian relic of failed Soviet revisionism, who is propped up with energy subsidies by the militarist Russian bosses. But on the other hand, we definitely wouldn’t support pro-U.S./pro-E.U. opposition leaders like Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. Their end game if they were to be put in power would be an infusion of capitalist reforms that would only continue and likely worsen attacks like income inequality and unemployment.
The cynical U.S. and E.U. capitalist bosses only care about the “human rights” of workers in Belarus so far as the geographical location of the country is significant for their imperialist goals. Similar to how they support  (one could argue unsuccessfully) regime change in Venezuela against Nicolas Maduro, their interests only lie in countering the influence of their imperialist rivals Russia and China, as they continue marching towards global conflict.
The best path forward for workers in Belarus and everywhere is to acknowledge the power we have as an international class, from Minsk to Hong Kong to Kenosha, and reject all these bosses completely. Organized into a mass international Progressive Labor Party, we can convert their upcoming world war into a class war where workers take state power and build an egalitarian communist society.  
*****
Capitalism & science
I have a point to add to the CHALLENGE (10/21) article The history of philosophy is written in blood about dialectical materialism.  The two trends of materialism and idealism exist together in struggle all the time. The ideas of the new society come from the class struggle within the old society. The article points out the threat to the rule of the church from the ideas of Copernicus. The Roman Catholic Church understood the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus was an official in the Catholic Church. The reason he was not persecuted was that he wrote it in Latin, which was not widely read, for use by the Church. Galileo became a threat when he wrote in Italian, which was an everyday language that would take the ideas outside the church’s control.
Within the incorrect theory of the sun revolving around the earth, there existed many accepted materialist ideas, such as the earth was round and navigation by stars. The practice and struggle between the Church and the rising capitalist class opened the door to the theory that the sun is the center of the universe, which had been around for many centuries. It was liberated with the rise of the early capitalists, who replaced the Church as the ruling class and could utilize and build on the more advanced ideas as opposed to suppressing them.
Today the mechanical materialism of capitalism is holding science back, much as the church did in the 1600’s. Capitalism is suppressing advanced ideas that debunk race and intelligence and thus threaten the bosses’ power. Communist revolution, based on dialectical materialism, will both liberate existing knowledge and open the door for a deeper understanding based on more struggle and practice.
*****
Book shows how liberals are biggest racist danger
The War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton does not present a class analysis, but has valuable information by showing how liberal politicians fostered mass incarceration.
People often credit President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) , with passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and  launching federal initiatives which were supposed to launch the “War on Poverty.” This is racist fiction. The next year Johnson sent to Congress the Voting Rights Act. But, just one week before that - on March 8, 1965, he presented to Congress the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) following an urban, rebellious summer against racist police terror months prior.
America's “justice system” of prisons, jails and police has  always promoted racist terror, but this act offered a response to the “threat” the Kerner Commission would, in 1968, designate as the continuing violent rebellions that came on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement.
The LEAA undercut many Great Society programs that history texts heed as LBJ’s liberal legacy. Still today, political pundits cite liberal leaders as reasons why we should vote.
The capstone of Johnson’s Great Society was the Safe Streets Act of 1968, which invested $400 million  into the War on Crime. By 1973 this funding grew to $850 million! By 1980, Ronald Regan made this initiative far more punitive. The ruling class was able to do this given legislative proposals from Nixon and Ford which further federalized police militarization. Liberal Jimmy Carter also extended surveillance and the U.S. Border Patrol while in office.
By the beginning of the Johnson Administration, there were 184,901 mostly Black and Latin  workers in state and federal prisons. By the end of Regan’s “War on Drugs” that number grew to 436,008.  
Liberal reformer LBJ bolstered these racist policies. Republicans did not create the expansion of our fascist “justice” criminal system - it was a product of liberal welfare programs. I would also include Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration's Executive Order 9066 that unapologetically interned some 120,000 Japanese into internment/concentration camps with about 2,000 who died of diseases like TB.  
In 1942, 23-year-old Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to relocate to these racist hellholes. His case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where his attorneys argued that the order violated the Fifth Amendment. He lost the case to FDR’s liberal Supreme Court!
Without a historically materialist understanding, a Joe Biden vote seems like a way to fight racism. The reality is much more bleak.
A meaningful discussion and struggle with our friends is essential for organizing to fight against capitalism. A for-profit system - a system that  relies on racist and sexist oppression and divisions and a fascist “justice” criminal system against the entire working class.
*****

New York City, October 18— “Mayor de Blasio, you have committed a crime, a major injustice against Black and Brown people, in particular to the men at the Lucerne Hotel…You are a racist, and even worse than that guy in the White House!”

That’s what a homeless resident-leader had to say at a rally at the Mayor’s residence at Gracie Mansion, where homeless people from three temporary shelters and their supporters presented de Blasio with the “Tale of Two Cities” Award. 

The Mayor wants to transfer the more than 240 mostly Black and Latin homeless men safely housed and socially distanced in the Lucerne Hotel, to a hotel in the Wall St. area. He ordered the men transferred, bowing to the demands of a handful of rich, racist businessmen and real estate owners, backed by former Mayor and top Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani.

The racist West Side Community Organization claims 10,000 followers on Facebook, but they have never put more than a handful in the street and never filed their threatened lawsuit. By bowing to the racists, de Blasio encouraged another group of rich racists in the Wall St. area to go to court to prevent the men from being moved to the Financial District. Another group has formed in Hell’s Kitchen. At best the liberal politicians cannot stop the fascists, and at worst, they are just like them, “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” It’s not just Trump! The whole racist profit system has got to go.

Today, Lucerne residents won a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to stop the planned transfer, at least until another hearing scheduled for November 16. More than 50 UWS residents showed up to support our homeless brothers and if need be, to stop the City from moving them out before their case was heard. The City attorneys argued that the homeless men have no right to stay at the Lucerne, and no right to have a say in where they would be placed. The judge, for now, rejected both arguments.

There are about 700 homeless workers in four UWS hotels, and thousands more in 60 hotels around the city. In May 2020, there were 13,523 homeless families with 20,044 homeless children in the New York City shelter system, more than two-thirds of the homeless shelter population, and 90% are Black and Latinx. Thousands of unsheltered homeless people sleep on the streets, in the subway and in other public spaces every night. (CoalitionfortheHomeless.org).

Meanwhile, 118 billionaires increased their wealth by $77 billion during the pandemic and the Democratic Governor, Mayor, City Council and State Legislature can’t or won’t touch them. With more than a million New Yorkers out of work and tens of thousands of families facing evictions next January, homelessness will spread faster than Covid-19.

The Upper West Side Open Hearts Initiative (UWS OHI) emerged out of the anti-racist uprising this summer to defend the Lucerne residents, staging protests, marches on the Mayor’s home, and organizing all levels of support from clothing distributions to 12-step classes and more as a number of the residents suffer from substance abuse and/or mental illness.

All of the Democratic mayoral candidates, City Council members and city-wide elected officials who have come to speak at rallies and press conferences have provided no help at all as the crisis of racist poverty and homelessness deepens. Talk is cheap.

PLP has been involved in this fight from the beginning, making new friends inside and outside the temporary homeless shelter. We are in this struggle to fight the racist attacks against our most vulnerable brothers, and to build the movement for communist revolution, to end racist inequality and homelessness forever.

The U.S. ruling class is in chaos. As the presidential election campaign kicks into final gear, the splits among the capitalists are getting sharper by the day.  The debate between Klan hero Donald Trump and mass incarcerator Joe Biden degenerated into an incoherent shouting match between two lifelong racist liars. After Trump and more than a dozen of his closest advisors tested positive for Covid-19, the Superspreader in Chief was left to shamble around a mostly deserted White House, jacked up on steroids and contradicting himself from one minute to the next. In the face of full-blown fascist China’s disciplined, sword-rattling challenge to U.S. dominance, the rupture between the Big Fascists (led by multinational finance capital like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs) and the Small Fascists (organized around domestic energy firms and short-term profits) has reached a breaking point.
Elections are a critical tool for resolving the capitalists’ internal conflicts. The Big Fascists need masses of workers to vote for their side to legitimize their plans for inter-imperialist war and fascism. Equally important, they need the myth of electoral democracy and the “peaceful transition of power” to mask their brutal capitalist dictatorship (see page 5). This time around, however, it’s unclear whether either gang of bosses will accept the results of the November ballot. The stakes are high. The future of the U.S. profit system and its teetering liberal world order hangs in the balance.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) calls on all workers to see that their power lies not in the voting booth but in class struggle in the streets and workplaces. Among capitalists there is no “lesser evil,” only a choice between blood-sucking mass murderers. Democrats and Republicans alike stand for racism, sexism, exploitation, state terror, and the death of millions from  lack of food, shelter, medical care, and public health infrastructure.  Only by organizing anti-racist fightback and building for communist revolution will we turn the tide against rising fascism and impending global war.
Rise of Small Fascists throws U.S. bosses into disarray
The Small Fascists’ agenda is to cut taxes for the wealthy, remove the U.S. military from costly overseas commitments, withdraw from international alliances, eliminate social services for the working class, and scrap environmental regulations. After years of organizing on the margins, with fringe third parties like the Libertarians, they found their chance to move inside the tent with the rise of the gutter racist Tea Party. But they were unable to challenge the Big Fascists’ stranglehold on state power until Trump. The failed developer and reality TV con man hijacked the Republican Party with a base of alienated white workers, hard-right vigilante racists, and hypocritical evangelicals. Finance capital placed its bet on the despicable Hillary (“Super-Predator”) Clinton and is still paying for its arrogance.
We know through dialectics that the internal is primary. The Big Fascists’ lack of discipline—their corruption, individualism, and short-term outlook—enabled the Small Fascists to grab power. The loss of decent-paying industrial jobs and two failed Middle East wars cracked open the door. The Great Recession of 2008 and Barack Obama’s bank bailout opened it wider. Small Fascists like the Kochs didn’t much like Trump and his anti-immigrant rants, since much of their profits come from immigrant labor. But in an act of mutual opportunism, they came together to seize the executive branch.
Trump’s wildly disruptive presidency reflects a qualitative change in the capitalist bosses’ internal struggle. To many CHALLENGE readers, Trump and his openly racist and sexist backers are repellent, the very essence of capitalist callousness, selfishness, and greed. They aren’t wrong. But for our class, the alternative can’t be Joe Biden and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Because it’s the Big Fascists who have an even more dangerous long-term outlook for the international working class.
Big Fascists in jeopardy
For over a century, and especially since World War II, U.S. finance capital has controlled the military, the intelligence agencies, all three branches of government, and virtually all of the big media. Along with rulers in Western Europe, they established alliances to maintain U.S. supremacy and contain their enemies, like the old Soviet Union and current-day China and Russia. Not so long ago, the bosses could work out their differences before the knives came out. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and named George W. Bush president. A united ruling class rallied behind the fascist Patriot Act and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formulated the Hart-Rudman plan, a blueprint to sustain its domination through the 21st century. The contradiction between the bosses’ two wings, so glaring today, was still young.
But external pressures have sharpened the contradiction. China’s rise—its Belt and Road Initiative, its global leadership in the pandemic—gives the U.S. bosses less room to patiently work out their disagreements. This reality is driving finance capital to fascism that much faster—first to destroy the Small Fascists, then to build a multicultural, patriotic movement to control the working class and prepare for World War III.
U.S. allies are plainly worried. After the first (and maybe last) Trump-Biden debate, labeled “a shit show” by CNN, a French political analyst said, “European leaders must have woken up this morning thinking, ‘The American leadership is over, and for a while, even if Biden is elected and tries to rebuild what Trump has destroyed.’” The U.S. bosses’ rivals also took notice. According to a state-controlled newspaper in China, “Such a chaos at the top of U.S. politics reflects division, anxiety of U.S. society and the accelerating loss of advantages of the U.S. political system” (NYT, 9/30).  
Although Trump proclaims himself the “law and order” president, the Big Fascists have a much longer and uglier history of promoting state terror against the working class. Biden, who built a career on serving the profit-hungry banks and credit card companies, is the embodiment of finance capital’s decay. From his 1994 mass incarceration crime bill, to the bloody Middle East wars executed by the Bushes and Obama, to his latest refusal to “defund” his beloved police, Biden has been the most loyal of stooges for the Big Fascists’ lethal program. His running mate and former prosecutor Kamala Harris, proudly known as California’s “top cop,” played a significant role in unleashing the Klan in blue to kill Black workers like Oscar Grant (NYT, 8/9).
Don’t vote, revolt!
Fighting for communism means building a mass revolutionary party and a world run by and for the international working class. We can’t get there with the bosses’ sham of democracy, with elections that force us to pick one racist exploiter over another. And we can’t get there without smashing the racist, sexist, and nationalist divisions that keep our class in shackles.
Over the seven months of the worldwide capitalist pandemic, in their fightback on the streets and their courageous labor in hospitals and grocery stores, workers have shown that our class can take the lead in caring for one another and overcoming the most challenging obstacles. These communist impulses within the working class are what keep the bosses up at night. The next step is to sharpen our struggle with comrades and friends to create that better world. Fight for communism! Join Progressive Labor Party!

BROOKLYN, October 1—“You are Scholars, Not Suspects!” That is the message the mainly Black and Latin students received as they entered their school building for the first day of school from a multiracial group of 40 parents and teachers. We met dozens of students as they lined up to walk through metal detectors on their first day back in a school building after more than six months. Racist metal detectors are the welcome back that thousands of mainly Black and Latin students have been given by the racist NYC Department of Education (DoE),  and City bosses who refuse to make any real antiracist changes even as they spew their empty promises of “equity.” As one chant said, “How do you spell RACIST? D-O-E!”
Members of a Brooklyn high school Parent Teacher Association (PTA) organized and rallied on the first day of the school buildings’ reopening, demanding the racist metal detectors be removed citywide (see box). This multiracial group has a long history of antiracist fightback against the many racist attacks hurled at students.
These past fightbacks include:

• demanding the removal of scanners for years
• demanding more and integrated sports teams
• defending students arrested inside the school for failing to remove a pin holding eyeglasses together
• protesting the disrepair of the school building itself to organizing to defend an anti-communist attack on members of the school.

In the wake of mass antiracist rage
When we can organize antiracist and antisexist actions we can build the confidence within our own class. Our PTA was touched by the explosion of mass anger coming out of the racist murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the start of the summer.  Time and again parents responded to our calls to join demonstrations and fight for communist ideas. Our multiracial and intergenerational leadership changed the tenor of several huge marches.  
In the run-up to Thursday’s picket line against racist metal detectors parents active with us over the summer, and who had seen liberal racism in action over a period of many years before that, rejected the notion that we ought to rely on misleader elected officials like Councilmember Brad Lander or NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to help lead our event.
Thursday’s demonstration also came in the wake of a series of club meetings, crowdcasts and zoom calls where Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members moved friends, student families, and coworkers into a discussion where the need for organizing against the racist attacks on students in the lose-lose scenario of remote vs. live instruction was hammered home.
These locally and nationally organized virtual meetings, along with responsibly distanced socializing, gave us a firm foundation to call for sharp action as the first day of live instruction for students approached.
Metal detectors, tool of terror and division
It is not always clear to students, parents, or school staff why metal detectors in schools are a racist attack. Some believe that they are there to provide safety. This is the lie that is sold to workers by a system that relies on racist divisions and fear mongering to keep the working class divided.
Metal detectors in school means that students are seen and treated as potential criminals. “In 2016, 99 percent of all New York City public school students handcuffed during incidents of emotional distress were Black and Latin. New York City’s Black students had the highest rate of suspension, accounting for 27.1 percent of the population but almost half of all suspensions. Statewide, 1 in 5 Black boys and 1 in 7 Black girls are suspended from school” (Alliance for Quality Education, 6/19).
This year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, scanning will result in even more harm, clogging entrances to schools where the urgent priorities should be maximizing physical distancing and instruction time. Even if it goes against any common sense or costs the city more money amidst  a budget crisis, one thing the bosses’ always give priority to is more racism!
Metal detectors in schools also build suspicion among students. They teach students to be fearful of one another. This ideology builds disunity within the working class, weakening our ability to unite as one working class against capitalism, the racist, sexist, exploitative class system. It builds the illusions that we cannot rely on each other for the solutions to the worlds’ problems. It builds the cynicism that therefore our only option is to put our hope in one politician or another’s empty promises to “fix” the very system they represent.  
Building our class muscles through struggle
This small, but significant action reflects the  kind of organizing that really can make a change. As we near the elections, it is hard to escape the pressure to view voting as the real way to make a change. Elections under capitalism are a lose-lose for workers because they reflect workers’ cynicism that the international working class does not have the potential to run society in our interests and builds the illusion that this system can be reformed in our interests  (see editorial, page 2.) The horrible handling of this pandemic from the beginning and the disorganized reopening of schools (some NYC schools are already reclosing following a rise in infection rates) illustrate how the bosses see our working-class children as completely expendable.
Only when the international working class controls all of society in the interests of our class, and not for the profits of a few, will we be able to truly build an antiracist, antisexist world that ALL of our children can thrive in. We still have a long way to go for the masses to turn these ideas into action and to turn action into a fight for a communist world. This rally was a small but hopeful step in that direction.