Maryland, February 12–A cohort of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members in Prince George’s County in Maryland have been working in a new coalition sponsored by an immigrants’ rights organization to address police misconduct. A town hall meeting was held that included Latin and Black victims of police brutality in collaboration with ICE (U.S immigrations and Customs Enforcement).
One particularly horrible case was described by “Jorge,”a “Dreamer.”He said, “local law enforcement’s job is [supposed] to keep us safe. Their job was to keep my mother, who was once a victim, of domestic violence safe,instead they arrested her,and told her she has 60 days to leave my sister and me alone in this country.”
Jorge’s mother was detained by a Prince George’s County Sheriffs officer while on her way to work. The officer said Jorge’s mother was speeding but Jorge pointed out “My mother’s driving makes other drivers go around her because it’s going so slow. I believe that the officer was racially motivated to pull my mother over.”
A petition calling for passage of “The Racial Equity in Policing” bill by the County Council is being circulated, and Council members are being lobbied.The bill includes the following points:
Prevent any cooperation between Prince George’s County police and ICE
Support police accountability through the mandatory use of police body cameras
Support an independent investigation with prosecutorial power anytime there is a death or serious trauma at the hands of the police
 Ban the use of internal, extra-judicial gang database.  
A strength of this emerging movement is the multiracial, multi-generational character of participants in the effort. But there are weaknesses in the group’s position,which holds that we can address the mistrust between law enforcement and workers by passing reforms that help deepen our engagement with police. This approach misses the fundamental role of the police in a capitalist society – intimidate, divide, and terrorize the working class to ensure maximum profits for the capitalists. Some participants in this coalition who have been reading Challenge are interested in this analysis and realize that it means we need revolution, not just working with politicians and police. We will continue to work on individual cases of brutality, of illegal police-ICE collaboration and of unjustified maintenance by the cops of a secret “gang list” while continuing to look towards a revolutionary future.

There have been intense daily protests in Venezeula since 2017. The opposition in a threatening move declared Juan Guaidó as president in the National Assembly, and foremost as “President in Charge” of the country. This shows us as we’ve said in many articles that socialism of the 21st century offers almost the same as capitalism. We have to move the masses towards Communism.
The Venezuelan conflict has reaffirmed the chess pieces in inter-imperialist rivalries. This country has the biggest oil reserves in the world. Mike Pence, the vice-president of the United States, was the first to recognize Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” of Venezuela, after Canada, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica and other countries lined up with the U.S. interests did the same.
While China, Russia, Bolivia and its allies continue to recognize Nicolas Maduro as president of Venezuela. It seems like a proxy war is possible (funded and prepared by the U.S.). The same thing that happened in Iraq, Libya, Yemen (and more) will happen in Venezuela.
While it’s true that the U.S. intervention has worsened the crisis, we can’t limit our analysis just to that, as other leftist organizations do. The history of Venezuela shows, once again that keeping money, the market and production of social relations inevitably leads to a crisis.  
Hugo Chávez’s (president from 1999 to 2013) era had economic, political, and social success not because of socialism. He reached political success because his government was able to channel the greatest increase of crude oil price in history. Another aspect is savage oil inflation pushed by external elements out of Venezuela that funded fast growing minimum wages, mass construction of homes and educational, medical, and national coverage.
Nicolás Maduro inherited a time bomb from Chavez. The inevitable happened. The oil price collapsed in 2014 and the country entered a crisis with no end.
Learning from this process means understanding that communist revolution can’t depend on the ability to sell and buy resources or seeing the masses as simple beneficiaries of reforms. At no point did the working class in Venezuela rule the means of production or society.
The working class needs to be won over to communist ideas, and organized by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). The party has to be the main driver of these much needed changes, for a new way of life.Eliminating money and profit immediately will free the creativity of the masses for the solution of immediate problems (food, water, shelter, security). We must fight for the production of food, people’s needs, communist education, massive campaigns to eradicate sanitary problems, for the zones controlled by the Party. The success of these goals will prepare the masses and demonstrate the organizational capacity of the Party, with our class leading the way.
In contrast the outcome of the Venezuelan crisis depends on who the military officials and middle ranking, and base soldiers supports. The officials of the Venezuelan military continue to be loyal to the official government, despite the pressure and the offering of amnesty on behalf of the opposition.
 PLP long recognized the failures of socialism. Today we organize and fight for communism in many parts of the world. The Venezuelan crisis makes clear the need for a working class revolutionary communist party with a fixed aim: communism.

LOS ANGELES, February 20—The church in which members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP)work organized a discussion on White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, a book written purposefully for white people, by a white person, about the defensiveness of white people in regards to racism. This text successfully erases any class analysis of racism and builds on the cynical ruling class idea that white and Black workers cannot unite against racism:

In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged…She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress (The New Yorker, 7/23/2018).

DiAngelo is popular among white liberals. She is an academic who has worked as a diversity trainer for businesses. Her theory of white fragility is based on the idea that white privilege insulates white people from racial stress and any discussion of race and racism makes them defensive. It also pushes the idea that white people are solely responsible for both creating and dismantling racism in the United States.
While DiAngelo states that race was a social construct created by the white ruling class to justify slavery and keep poor white workers separate from enslaved Blacks and indigenous workers, she gives little to no examples of ways for white workers to fight back against it.
Her book is more descriptive than solution oriented. All she suggests is for white people to acknowledge their white privilege, and join all-white anti-racist organizations like SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) who will support Black Lives Matter, listen, reflect, and be more racially aware toward nonwhite people. We cannot fight racism by using the very tools the bosses use to keep us divided.

On the class question of racism
In Black Reconstruction in America, communist fighter and thinker W.E.B. Du Bois writes,

[T]he white group of laborers, while they receive a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.

White privilege theorists love to co-opt Du Bois’s words out of context. This psychological wage is the ideological division used to prevent white and Black workers from uniting as one class. Du Bois continues:

The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.

Without that crucial analysis, we fall into the trap of blaming each other for a systematic problem that hurts us all, albeit to different degrees. White privilege theory, and all identity politics, is based on a politics of difference, which deliberately seeks to undermine and break any potential for working-class unity.

Who benefits from racism?
White Fragility touched on institutional racism in the context of white people (as a monolithic group) running the institutions and not on capitalism needing racism to keep the working class divided and super exploiting Black, Latin, Asian, and immigrant workers. What DiAngelo conveniently fails to do is show how, under the threat of rebellion, the U.S. constructed race and racism off the tears, blood, flesh of Black, indigenous, and white workers. Lerone Bennett’s masterpiece essay The Road Not Taken in The Shaping of Black America illustrates this:

The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money...Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, and the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy – the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.
[The separation of our class] was done by the creation of a total system of domination, a system that penetrated every corner of Colonial life and made use of every Colonial institution. Nothing was left to chance. The assemblies, the courts, the churches, and the press were thrown into the breach.
The whole system of separation and subordination rested on official state terror. The exigencies of the situation required men to kill some white people to keep them white and to kill many blacks to keep them black. In the North and South, men and women were maimed, tortured, and murdered in a comprehensive campaign of mass conditioning. The severed heads of black and white rebels were impaled on poles along the road as warnings to black people and white people, and opponents of the status quo were starved to death in chains and roasted slowly over open fires. Some rebels were branded; others were castrated. This exemplary cruelty, which was carried out as a deliberate process of mass education, was an inherent part of the new system.

Clearly, if the ruling class ran a state terror campaign to create race and racism, it cannot be for the benefit of any worker. White privilege is a ruling-class idea.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said it plainly, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

Segregation continues today
Race and racism has been maintained.  Lerone Bennett’s essay continues:

As the seventeenth century ended and the eighteenth century began, white arrogance increased, and a yawning chasm opened up between blacks and whites....Responding to this situation, blacks began to define themselves in opposition to whites, who were viewed as enemies and oppressors.

The bosses over the four hundred years of conditioning have succeeded in separating the natural unity between Black and white workers. Institutions like schools are more segregated today than they were in the 1960s (The Atlantic, 6/11/12). At the discussion, participants talked about their segregated neighborhoods and schools.  Another PL’er brought up going to a diverse school that was still very segregated and their experience with Black and Latin students being racist towards each other. The moderators quickly jumped in to say that wasn’t racism because “people of color can’t be racist.”

What do they fear the most?
An oppressor’s greatest fear is multiracial unity. When Black workers can organize hand in hand with their white counterpart, we are subverting 400 years of racist conditioning. Our discussion showed that workers of all races want to learn about racism and how to combat it. We will continue to struggle with those who were open to the ideas of multiracial unity and actively fighting racism.

On day one of the teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, California almost 50,000 parents, teachers, and students converged in front of LA City Hall to march to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) headquarters. As the days went by, community support grew despite a major teacher-bashing media campaign. Day five of the strike was a turning point, with more than 60,000 people rallying, and surveys showing almost 80 percent of LA County supporting the striking teachers.
LAUSD has historically been a school district with rampant racism and segregation. The rise of charter schools intensified this, taking away students with more academic skills and leaving the public schools in poor Black and Latin communities with higher percentages of students who need intensive support with less funding.
For the first time, 86 percent of public school children in LA are non-white (kidsdata.org), and California is now the state with the highest student-to-teacher ratio in the country (Education Week 1/19). Teachers, students, and the community were fed up with class sizes of 42 students or more, racist random searches, and the slashing of nursing services to just once a week, among other problems.
Liberal politicians
kill workers power
As the strike continued, misleading liberal politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, and California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond jumped on the bandwagon. The role of the Democrats and liberals in periods of increased working class fight back is to pacify us and push us towards reforming the system instead of destroying it.
For example, even though he paid lip service to the plight of students and teachers, Garcetti put pressure on the teachers’ union to go back to the bargaining table in order to quickly end the strike. This just shows that Democrats are not real allies of the working class.
Democrats like Diane Ravitch blame workers rights for “bad education.” In the liberal Brookings Institute, she stated  “American public education is a failed enterprise… Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions...”(11/10).
Under Barack Obama’s Administration, Democrat Arne Duncan unleashed racist austerity measures against Chicago public schools by starving the budget, promoting charter schools, and purged Black educators from the schools (Common Dreams.org 01/19).Despite the liberals’ rhetoric in the media, conservatives and liberals are on the same page when it comes to education.
Workers solidarity should be our only allegiance
Whether Republican or Democrat, the bosses have always tried to control the educational system in the interests of maintaining capitalism. Recently, the conservative Koch network of billionaire bosses, and politicians held a ‘seminar’ in California, where they discussed “increasing technology for individualized learning” and “pluralistic school models” (Washington Post 1/19).
This would mean higher teacher-to-student ratios and less job security, resources and basic rights for teachers and students, especially at schools in  the working class Black and Latin neighborhoods.
When it comes down to it, the union leadership is no friend to the working class either. For example, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) pushed the teachers to vote in a few short hours on day six of the strike so that they would getback to work the next day as the school board and the politicians wanted.
They touted a substandard deal as a “huge win” and got teachers and students to celebrate miniscule improvements such as lowering class size by four students over the next three years and a 6 percent raise (barely covering cost of living increases in LA). This is business as usual for union sellouts: making backdoor deals, squashing militant fightback of the rank-and-file, and further dividing the working class.
That was a lesson for a lot of the teachers in our schools: do not trust the union leadership. In one school, teachers were talking about refusing to pay union dues and saying we can’t depend on the union leadership.
Although 80 percent of the union membership voted to accept the contract, because the union leadership said that it was the best we could get, many know it will not address the heart of inequity in the schools. Some of these teachers are our coworkers who read Challenge regularly, a number that doubled after the strike.
Members of Progressive Labor Party(PLP) in LA have been working inside reform movements and inside the teachers’ union for many years. After a fight (led by members of PLP) for the teachers’ union to take an official stand against the racist police, a Racial Justice Committee was formed.
From struggles to implement restorative justice programs in schools, to attempts to end the racist random search policy, PLP members have struggled regularly with union members who considered themselves to be anti-racists. It’s partially because of this work that the union bargained with the district around anti-racist issues instead of just salary and class sizes. Known as “bargaining for the common good,”this is one of the main reasons the community supported the strike.
This inclusion of the community into the fight, along with the obvious support of the students, parents, and school staff in this struggle against billionaires and privitizers, was a huge forward step for the working class here. Even if the strike ended too early and gave up too many concessions, the fight itself was worth it. At one high school, after bold militant action to identify and stop scabs, there was a stronger sense of trust and unity among the teachers and staff.
 One of the teachers pointed out more clearly how school cops and administrators in heated situations become tools of state power. The strike sparked conversations about the history of the labor movement, failed unions, communist ideology, racism, and organizing the working class for revolution. Strikes are opportunities for class-conscious ideological development, but it will take more of this sort of work to turn them into schools for communism.
In order for a wave of large strikes to turn into a revolution to change the system, we have to develop class consciousness. Small things we do can have larger repercussions down the line as we build workers’ unity, anti-racism, anti-sexism and turn cynicism into scientific analysis.
The real victory of this strike was the community, students and coworkers coming together to fight for the working class, and teaching our students about the value of class struggle.
We will continue the fight together with our working class brothers and sisters to get them to see the need for revolution and a communist system in which everything, including education, will be run by and for the working class. Getting Challenge to more people and following through with people who have expressed interest in PLP events is an important next step.

*****

Organize against racism
Members of PLP recently went to Accelerated Charters Schools in South Los Angeles to join their strike against deplorable working conditions. This is the first charter school in LA to strike, a positive development in teacher resistance against the racist capitalist education system, since one in five students in LA are now in charter schools. The Accelerated Charter Schools suffer from 50 percent yearly teacher turnover, no health insurance, huge class sizes, and firing of teachers on the spot.
This particular school has a mainly Latin student population. This is typical of charter schools. Since schools in the United States in neighborhoods with whiter and wealthier students usually get more resources, families from those neighborhoods don’t rely on charter schools. This has led to charter schools creating even more segregation and racism in schools.
One math teacher at the school told us “... good teachers are not asked to come back. They stay for one to two years before leaving. Last year, the 8th graders had six teachers (substitutes) for the first half of the year, one credentialed teacher for one month, then another teacher for the last three months.” This has created an apathetic environment, and students reject the teachers due to the high turnover. The same teacher said,“It’s just a business. If you speak up for the students and talk about shortages in the classroom, they get rid of you.”  
After 10 days of picketing, Accelerated teachers successfully forced through a contract that will both improve their working conditions and their students’ learning conditions. Some of this included: annual signing bonuses of $10,000 for teachers, the formation of a Collaborative Consensus Committee for stakeholders to discuss issues and implement improvements to school wide practices, and annual increases in the employer’s share of healthcare costs (UTLA.net 01/19). Even though they received these bonuses and necessities such as arbitration, teachers will still have enormous class sizes, short staff, and salaries that do not keep up with inflation. There is still work to be done!
PLP members have gone to both public and charter schools to show the need for unity in both sectors. The Democrats and Republicans want us to see public and charter school teachers as natural enemies. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that “... the elite types who use charters as a force for competition will see this as a big blow. We’re now seeing a mainstream shift toward neighborhood public schools with the goal being: let’s make them work for all kids.” (utla.net 01/19) However, this is a false paradigm.
In all schools they teach our kids to accept capitalism and push them into low-wage jobs, prisons, or the military. We can never have “fair contracts” under capitalism whether you are in public or charter schools. In this, public and charter school teachers are natural allies, and should continue to organize together against these racist teaching and learning conditions. To get the schools we need and deserve for all of our students and our teachers, we need to use these strikes as lessons in a school for communism.