I attended a Martin Luther King march organized by the Coalition to Protect Chinatown & Lower East Side. The main lesson is that we cannot trust liberal politicians and that we can only rely on the working class to get what we need.
I’ve been involved in fighting the housing crisis affecting the vast majority of workers in New York City. This is the second year I’ve participated in the MLK march to call out the city’s racist displacement agenda. The rally had a multiracial and multi-generational character. While the march was smaller than last year’s, it was qualitatively better. The workers speaking testified to the communities organizing to unite all members of the community: Black, white, and Latin, and Asian against the City’s racism, in order to fend off their plans to build four luxury mega-towers not just  in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, but throughout NYC.
Moreover the politics of the march were sharper. Last year, the coalition ended the program by directing us to vote for a better public advocate. This year, the speakers emphasized the need to organize and not depend on politicians to change the system. Our speakers publicly exposed the local liberal Big Fascists by denouncing Councilmember Margaret Chin and Mayor Bill de Blasio, and their record of colluding with real estate developers and displacing communities. Though Chin is Chinese and de Blasio has Black family members, they are not friends of workers.
They also called out Corey Johnson, the head of the City Council, and a representative of the gay rights movement. We delivered a 5,000-signature petition demanding Johnson stop the mega-towers and support our community led rezoning plan to protect the entire neighborhood  from more luxury out of scale developments,that destroy the environment and displace workers.  He was nowhere to be found. The coalition charged him with covertly facilitating the displacement of the community by electing to use the city’s sham land review process called the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP).The ULURP process exposes the fundamental futility of capitalist democracy, because the bosses let you participate in it to fool you into thinking your voice matters, but ultimately they use it to give their class (in this case the developers) more power to exploit workers and rob us of resources.
Through experience, the workers in this mass organization are learning that the only way workers can win is if we unite against racism without the handouts of politicians. In this political climate, not many workers are calling out the liberals in addition to the conservative scumbags. Most nonprofits are laser focused on just president Donald Trump being the main enemy. Hence, it is progress for this multiracial group of workers to attack all politicians.
A few Progressive Labor Party (PLP) comrades who attended distributed CHALLENGE and made contact with workers. After the march, I spoke with friends about why liberals are the main danger. I pointed out that this system is rotten and even if we elect members of oppressed groups that profess the best intentions, they will continue to grease the machine that keeps the capitalist machine functioning. The response I received was very positive.
There is a lot of potential to win workers through this area of work. I plan to continue to build a base with the help of fellow comrades, to make CHALLENGE a staple there and to infuse the day-to-day organizing with communist politics. Under communism we would abolish the toxic cycle of ownership, exploitation, and the profiteering of workers’ labor and natural resources like air, sunlight, and water. No one  would be homeless and housing would be a public non-negotiable right not a commodity that can be bought and sold. We must win workers to the idea that if we the workers create all of the value in society, we should be able to control and decide how it is distributed and for what purpose. That’s communism. We must not only fight for better housing conditions today, we must fight for a whole new world, for a better tomorrow.

CHICAGO, January 19—Mass South Asian organizations protested against the increasingly sharp attacks on Muslim workers in India by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Two members of Progressive Labor Party distributed CHALLENGE to 50 of the 200 marchers. We held up the paper so people could see the backpage headline, “India: Capitalist Turmoil Rears It’s Fascist Head.” Protesters responded warmly.
In addition to occupying and shutting down the Muslim-majority region of Jammu and Kashmir, BJP created a National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the eastern state of Assam, forcing workers to prove that they’d arrived in India before the mid-1970s. Since most workers lack the required documentation, over two million people, mostly Muslims, have been stripped of their citizenship. They now face placement in detention centers or deportation to neighboring Bangladesh (Time, 12/20/19). Most recently, the BJP government drafted a Citizenship Amendment Bill for fast-tracked citizenship—except for Muslim workers.
Although the leading slogans were in defense of “liberal secular democracy,” the group also chanted “Narendra Modi you can’t hide, you committed genocide!” Calling for a secular democracy is a meaningless term under the capitalist dictatorship of the bosses; the phrase assumes there is democracy for workers to begin with.
Self-critically, the PL comrades could have done a better job to engage with these South Asian protesters. Putting a paper in their hand is a start but the personal connection is essential. We also need to learn some of those chants in Hindi. Due to the language barrier, we were unable to evaluate their politics.

LORTON, VA, January 22—After three brave and bold months of striking, the 130 TransDev transit workers at the Cinder Bed Road facility of the D.C. area transit authority (WMATA) have approved a contract and returned to work. (See earlier articles 12/4/2019 and 1/11/20).
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members joined the workers’ picket lines and rallies over this period, bringing revolutionary ideas and strategies to these workers, many of whom hail from African and Latin American countries and were enthused to have communist support. The bosses thought they could crush the efforts of these workers by refusing to negotiate seriously, and then not at all. But it was the bosses who finally gave in and the workers gained a partial victory.
Murky contract
The new contract provides for a $3.50 increase in pay for bus operators over two years and a 7 percent increase in pay for other workers in the bargaining unit. Much else remains murky, as the contract language on health insurance is not clearly defined. The contract uncertaintities are one way the bosses will try to take back what was won during the strike. That is the nature of capitalism, the bosses try and often do take back whatever gains our class makes during struggles like this. The only way to fully liberate our class from the bosses is to fight for a society run by the working class, communism.
The workers accepted the contract not so much because of its content, but mainly as a gateway to better paying jobs with Metro, the regional transit system. Metro has contractually agreed to end contracting out in two years, fire Transdev (the private contractor), and bring these workers into the main collective bargaining agreement as direct employees of the public transit system.
Lessons from the strike
An important lesson from the strike is that even a small group of workers who provide a key public service – in this case moving workers in Northern Virginia to jobs throughout the region – can, by withholding their labor and shutting down production, fight and win some reforms from the bosses. Could they have done better? More could probably have been won had the 8,000 D.C. Metro workers in the main Metro union forced their leadership to join the strike. While there were some rumblings about expanding the strike to all transit workers, the union limited its support to a large strike benefit and verbal support of the Cinder Bed workers.
Build a base for communism
But beyond the increase in wages, the fight is still going on to build a base for communism among the TransDev and D.C. Metro workers. Our class wins in these kinds of battles when we gain the confidence to fight for a society without the bosses. That is the most important thing about these battles. Under capitalism, any gains workers make are always subject to reversal. The bosses regroup and launch a counter-attack, which we expect to happen in transit shortly.
Only a communist movement which can defeat the capitalist system and replace it with workers’ power, communism, can sustain its victories.  Defeating racism and building workers’ confidence and committment to abolish the wage system of capitalism are essential to the struggle to take power from the bosses.
The PLP members fought hard through this strike to advance this understanding and expect that, before too long, more transit workers will join PLP in the long-term struggle for communism.

The following two novels by U.S. communist writer Howard Fast analyze and promote working-class class solidarity. Freedom Road (1944) dramatizes the fight against racism in the South after the Civil War, the promise of multiracial solidarity between Black and white farmers during Reconstruction, and its defeat in 1877. The Proud and the Free (1950) is about the Rebellion of the Pennsylvania Brigades of the Revolutionary Army in January, 1780, against brutal treatment by their own officers.
These novels can stimulate students’ interest in the U.S. history that we have been denied. These books connect the class struggles of the past century and of today, the fight against racism and for working-class liberation with the main, though hidden, currents of life.  
Freedom Road
Freedom Road (which went on to be a movie with Muhammad Ali as the lead) is an antiracist novel with a class analysis – exactly what is needed in this time, as class analysis of racism, when not denied outright, is indirectly denied through the liberal theories of white privilege and intersectionality.
Fast’s protagonist is Gideon Jackson, a former enslaved worker, who escaped, joined the Union Army, and has returned to South Carolina. He understands the necessity of uniting with white workers, and is elected to the State Legislature. He and other formerly enslaved workers join with working class white farmers to build Carwell, a multiracial farming community.
The former enslavers, still the landowners, engineer the compromise of 1876, the end of Reconstruction, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South. Then they organize and incite the Ku Klux Klan terrorists. The Klan besieges and destroys Carwell, killing everyone.
Fast’s novel is very clear: relying on “voting” is as futile and self-defeating after the Civil War as it was before. Only violence can defeat the class of former enslavers, who now form a landed aristocracy. They depend on keeping Black labor cheap and passive through terrorism, and by disarming their natural allies,white workers, through the false ideology of “white supremacy.”
The most class-conscious personage in the novel is the former enslaver and aristocrat Stephan Holmes. Holmes tells his fellow landowners that their racist prejudice against Black people has blinded them to the abilities and intelligence of the Black formerly enslaved people and of their allies, the poor whites. Holmes uses “race” to disguise “class.”
Fast’s main source is the book Reconstruction: the Battle for Democracy 1865-1876, by James Allen, a historian and member of the Communist Party USA. Allen edited the communist paper The Southern Worker, which had to be produced in secrecy since the Party’s organizing efforts in the South were subject to fascist attack by the Klan and the F.B.I.
The Proud and the Free
The book is narrated by Jamie Stuart, who, as a 22-year-old orphaned son of indentured servants, joined the American Revolutionary Army in the “Foreign Brigade” of Pennsylvania.
The enlisted men live in slum-like housing near Morristown, New Jersey with little food, clothing or money. By contrast, the officers, led by the Continental Army’s General Anthony Wayne, enjoy gourmet food, fine wine, well-tailored clothes, and servants.
The rank-and-file soldiers—Protestants, Jewish, Black, Irish, atheist, and Roman Catholic workers—recognize their fundamental interests in unity on the basis of class, seeing their officers, the gentry, and especially the British, as their common enemy.
Led by a Committee of Sergeants the brigades, through surprise and organization, present a fait accompli to their officers. They form a new, free fighting force. Ultimately the soldiers agree to return to Wayne’s army as long as (1) there are no reprisals; and (2) those who are owed a bounty be paid, and (3) those whose term of enlistment had expired are discharged.
Stuart returns to York, PA, and his fiancée, Molly Bracken. But, drawn by loyalty to his comrades in arms, Stuart rejoins the brigade. Then the officers take their revenge.
After the war, Stuart lives a long life. When his beloved Molly dies, he feels lost. Then an escaped enslaved person comes to his home. Stuart realizes that the new Abolitionist movement has goals like those for which he and his comrades had fought in the Revolution but which were never achieved—the liberation of the working people. He joins the Underground Railroad.
Further readings
Fast based this book on Mutiny in January (Viking, 1943) by Carl Van Doren, the only full-length study of this rebellion and still a good read today. Auxiliary readings that have proven successful in class include: Sterling North’s negative review in the World Telegram & Sun (1950) accusing Fast of “treason” for daring to write about class conflict during the American Revolution, and Fast’s “Reply to Critics” from Masses & Mainstream (1950). Both are available online.
These novels are inspiring because they present a class analysis, something rare in literature. They advocate for multiracial solidarity within the working class. We need challenge readers to apply the lessons of these novels to the class problems of 2020.
(For digital copies of the materials named in this article, write to CHALLENGE).