Bogota, December 18–On November 21, Colombia started experiencing its most massive mobilizations of the last several decades. These demonstrations have filled the streets of the big cities and all of its municipalities. They have continued in the form of “cacerolazos” (workers demonstrations where they bang on pots and pans) that sprout everywhere.  Many of these are led by female students and workers. This demonstrates the massive rejection of the sexist government of Duque - Uribe, its corruption and economic policies.
The workers also demonstrated against the government for its complicity in the selective killings of more than 600 social leaders, indigenous extermination and widespread racist violence.
The day before the mobilization there were dozens of raids on the homes of strike participants. This strategy of intimidation ultimately only served to further stoke the rebellion and increase the flow of protesters. ESMAD’s (the Colombian riot police) strong clashes and attacks on women and protesters left more than 800 detainees, 50 raids, 4 murders and more than 300 wounded. The rulers increased their tried and true criminal policy: create fear and sell security.
During the first night of the national strike in Cali and the second night in Bogotá, the bosses imposed a curfew. This fascist measure had not been taken in the capital in more than four decades. Cities were militarized and an atmosphere of panic was created for alleged looting of residential complexes. People reported having captured some looters who said they received 50 thousand pesos to loot. The objective was to show the military as heroes, saviors, while sowing fear and relating it to the strike.
In other neighborhoods of the city, the cacerolazos defeated the curfew in practice. On the third day, workers retook the streets overcoming their fear. This served as a great experience since the workers need to get rid of their fear in order to face these bosses’ attacks.
Peace between social classes, serves criminal bosses! This was the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) slogan that we chanted and that was well received by the masses. The media, trade union bureaucracy and reformist politicians insist on pacifism as a principle of the strike and a large majority of protesters have accepted it. But the fact that these protests are peaceful does not mean that we must remain passive in the face of continuous aggressions, detentions and beatings. In order to defend ourselves against the criminal attacks of our class enemies, we must organize mass revolutionary violence. These attacks will not end as long as capitalism exists. The bosses need to minimize our living conditions because they need to maximize their profits.
As long as they have the power they will continue to fire us, cut our wages, our pensions, and our health care and educational services. The workers will continue fighting against these cuts. That is why we have the urgent need to organize ourselves in a revolutionary international communist party, the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). Then workers can lead a communist revolution to abolish capitalism. In that way, we can form a new communist society where what we produce will serve to meet our needs and not to enrich a handful of criminal bosses.

PAKISTAN, December 18—Thousands of students marched with red flags on the streets in fifty-one cities across the country demanding to form student unions.  Progressive Labor Party is striving to bring more people close to our communist politics. A worker-student alliance is a building block of a pro-communist idea.
Progressive unions banned
General Zia ul Haq banned the right to unionize in 1984. Before that, union activities were managed by the state to spread unrest and a war-like situation among the different student’s organizations in mid 80s. This was to show that students were creating unrest in the campuses therefore it was imperative to ban their politics. Religious and pro-capitalist student organizations were used to attack the members of progressive student organizations. At that time, these religious student organizations used to spread fundamentalism in the campuses to produce the support for the U.S. in Afghanistan, which was difficult for them in the presence of the strong progressive student’s organizations. This ban was just for progressive students organizations because rightists were functioning in the campuses and also using all the resources of universities for their own activities.
Anti-progressive, anti-communist
More than 12 student organizations decided to hold rallies, including the Progressive Students Collective and Student Action Committee.Their demands include the restoration of students unions, raising awareness about the persisting educational crisis in Pakistan and against the harassment at the campuses, tuition fee hike, lack of hostel and laboratory facilities, and religious fundamentalism in the campuses. Overall, students are demanding a conducive educational environment, which cannot be a possibility under a system that is based on exploitation and inequality. Capitalism can never provide that.
Anti-progressives are not happy. Among many allegations leveled against the fighting students was that they were “driven by foreign powers” and were “being misused for someone’s vested interests.”  Eyebrows were also raised over how people from all walks of life turned the country red—red clothing, holding red posters, raising full-throated slogans against the system, and waving red flags.
Red Scare is still prevailing in Pakistan; after the march, all the TV channels (mouthpieces of bosses) are talking to curb these reds.
Student-worker solidarity
In these marches, we saw a unity between workers and students, which is threatening to the bosses.  A united working class can that rise up against unemployment, exploitation, and terrorism, and can organize to build a revolutionary communist movement to destroy the capitalist system.
It is up to PLP to recruit workers and students to a communist outlook and a lifetime of communist organizing. These student struggles to unionize can be schools for communist politics. Read CHALLENGE as part that schooling.

NEWARK, NJ, November 9 — More than 40 multiracial friends and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in the greater New York City area gathered for the annual College Conference. The conference aims to bring students, workers, faculty and staff together each year, and the main topic this year was the growth of fascism on campuses and how to fight it.
Speakers and workshop discussions were organized so that all conference participants could learn from one another how to build a mass movement across our campuses uniting, students, faculty and workers. And that means building a mass, fighting PLP on every campus to fight back against increasing “austerity” and to smash racist and fascist repression with communist revolution!
Envisioning communist education
The conference began by inviting participants to think about what education might look like if the working class ran the world under communism. Participants were inspired by the idea of a system that could help everyone to succeed, and questioned how differently universities would be structured in a world run by the working class — or if they would exist in their current form at all. Ideas flowed about breaking down the racist and sexist divisions between mental and physical labor, the power of education through collective working class struggle, and what apprenticeships and collaborations might look like among workers with different experiences and skills sets.
While we recognized that we could not know how the needs of a worker-led communist world would change education, this stimulating discussion revealed many of the problems working class youth face fighting for an education under capitalism. This set the stage for the panel of speakers discussing struggle and fightback on their campuses.
               What we do counts!
A State of the World speech from a PL’er then set the tone of struggle and fightback from workers around the world in the midst of a period of sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry among groups of capitalists and the growing reality of deadlier wars. The panel of speakers gave inspiring and detailed reports of struggles on New York and New Jersey campuses — from the strike movement at Rutgers University to the struggle to defend undocumented students from deportation at the City University of New York, struggles documented in previous issues of CHALLENGE.
These reports were also connected with the State of the World speech in that the conflicts within the capitalist class of the U.S. and around the world framed the significance of each struggle within an international context. They showed the potential of how building a fighting PLP on these campuses can eventually influence the course of global events, and put emphasis on the reality that each new CHALLENGE reader we win, each antiracist struggle, each fightback on each campus that we organize today — they all count. Each one counts because they build a Party that will move millions to build the mass revolutionary movement we need to smash capitalism.
Workshops: education to
 organize and fight back
The workshops that immediately followed focused on these questions: who are our class enemies on campus? How do we fight our class enemies on campus? New friends of the Party stepped up to help each workshop group collectively analyze the roles of local politicians, campus administrators, disciplinary rules for students and faculty, financial aid, and campus police. These are all a part of the capitalist state, and they exist to control students and faculty. We discussed and applied the philosophy and science of dialectical materialism to connect our individual and particular experiences and struggles with the systemic and general pressures our working class sisters and brothers collectively face.
A big part of the workshop discussions focused on selling and building a mass readership of CHALLENGE on each campus. CHALLENGE is not like any capitalist newspaper; it is our collective organizer. It summarizes and shares the experiences of working class fightback around the world, and teaches us all how to build a PLP capable of destroying this capitalist state dictatorship, not only responsible for every racist and sexist attack on each campus, but also for every imperialist war and every forced migration of workers around the world.
By the time we reassembled as a large group share out what we learned, it was clear that everyone, from our new friends to the veteran fighters, were inspired and educated. We concluded with sharper plans for continuing the struggles on our campuses, and many of those present left to join other friends and comrades at the celebration dinner of the Bolshevik Revolution in Brooklyn. The struggle to build a mass communist movement on our area campuses continues!

In 1926, a communist-led 17-week strike of 12,000 New York City fur workers fought and won significant reforms beating back the bosses’ association, the cops, Mafia gangsters, thugs, and the reactionary International union leadership. They were led by Ben Gold, a member of the Communist Party and leader of the union’s N.Y. Joint Board. The very next year the fur industry bosses were disregarding the gains won by the workers. Gold had to organize the workers to strike again. They did and they won again.
Gold went on to organize many more strikes. Many of them were successful. So the workers won the 40-hour, five-day workweek, a 10 percent raise, 10 paid holidays and more. Then they went on strike again and again to maintain their gains. Today workers around the world are still protesting and striking for a decent life. However it is only when the international working class organizes to take power and destroy capitalism with communist revolution, that we can finally free ourselves from this capitalist nightmare.
It all started on January 23, when over 6000 workers attended a mass union meeting and authorized a strike. The head of the bosses’ association, called these demands a “conspiracy” to “Bolshevize” (spread communist ideas in) the fur industry. At a January 30 mass meeting Gold declared, “All the forces of the union must be concentrated for this effort.” A sea of hands went up to volunteer for a General Picketing Committee.” The bosses urged workers to reject their leadership and defeat the “Communist conspiracy.” Instead, the workers voted by over 90 percent to authorize a strike. This was a good time to talk about a government totally controlled by the capitalists. A government that would violently attack the workers. A government that had to be overthrown by a communist-led working class. Instead the communists were running and even winning elections for some low-level government positions.
Mass picketing beats back
 scabs, gangsters, cops
The strike began on Feb. 16. The General Picketing Committee of 1,000 kept out scabs and strikebreakers. The strike was an historic struggle by U.S. workers. On the following Monday, 10,000 strikers marched through the fur district. The cops charged, but the workers maintained solid ranks, beating back the police, scabs and hired thugs. The cops repeated their attacks on every march. But the unity of these communist-led, Jewish, Black and Greek, women and men workers was unshakeable. When hired Mafia thugs attacked the strike hall, hundreds of strikers overwhelmed them, stripping them of their guns, blackjacks, knives and clubs as they fled. After several weeks of such battles, no gang was willing to attack.
Many bosses now faced bankruptcy and were ready to grant the union’s demands. But the sellout International union officers were meeting secretly with the bosses to betray the workers and to stop the rising influence of the communist-led New York union. Gold and the General Strike Committee urged workers to go to a union meeting at Carnegie Hall and tell the sellouts: “Hands off our strike! Get out of the way!” When workers learned that Ben Gold had been barred from the meeting, they began chanting, “We want Gold!” The four union sellouts gave up and left. The workers went wild. Gold told the strikers: “This meeting … proves that the fur strikers are fighting...for the cause of organized labor in America…All this wealth we, the workers, created ….”  The workers carried Gold out of the hall on their shoulders. This event demonstrated that the working class can understand communist ideas and will defend communist leaders.
Mass picketing intensified, as did police attacks. One arrested striker wrote to the General Strike Committee:  “… do not spend any money in trying to obtain my release.... the money is necessary for more important matters... I hope that when I come back, I will find...a great victory.”
On May 17, the General Strike Committee called for a giant rally in Madison Square Garden. Support wires came from across the U.S. But the union was broke and needed at least $50,000 to cover strike relief. In one of the greatest acts of sharing in U.S. labor history, more than $100,000 was raised. On June 11, at 3:00 a.m. the strike was settled. The workers won significant reforms.
The communist-led, largely immigrant furriers’ union was a beacon to the U.S. working class. Over two decades, they would beat down Mafia goons; confront the Nazi Bund in the streets of New York; fight in the Spanish Civil War and donate trucks and ambulances to the anti-fascist fighters. They provided security for Paul Robeson’s Peekskill concerts that were attacked in 1949 by racist, anti-communist mobs. But the Communist Party did not call on these heroic workers to organize a revolutionary movement to overthrow the capitalist class and build a communist society run by the working class.
Thousands of fur and garment workers joined the old Communist Party, and for some time, had some vision of overthrowing capitalism and building a communist future. But that vision was clouded and eventually buried as the Communist Party gave up the fight for revolution. Today it is our task in the Progressive Labor Party, to have confidence in the working class to join us in the fight for a communist world.