LOS ANGELES, CA, January 23—Tens of thousands of education workers led a strike for six school days for the learning conditions students deserve. They called for reduced class sizes, more school personnel such as librarians, nurses, and counselors, to create “community schools” which serve the communities who have the most need, regulate charter schools, decrease testing, and pay teachers a living wage. Parents, students, and community members showed solidarity by joining picket lines, rallies and actions across Los Angeles for six working days.
As communists, we understand that class struggle is a critical aspect to winning the working class to have confidence that we can overthrow capitalism and replace it with a society that is run for and by the workers. With this in mind, we met to plan our involvement in this massive strike.
Progressive Labor Party here supported the picket lines at 10 different schools around the City. We distributed a PLP leaflet and CHALLENGE. We led militant chants and some scab confrontations. We also made dozens of new contacts with school workers and supporters. Strikers appreciated the contributions we made to the struggle.
No one crosses the picket line
At one high school where a PL’er works, a strike committee was formed to prepare for the upcoming actions. The teachers on this committee were able to get many teachers, students, parents, and friends to rally. They received support from the community. During the week, teachers worked together to come up with plans on how to prevent scabs from crossing their picket line and how to keep their unity in the struggle.
Initially, the situation was very tense. Some teachers were unsure if they were willing to trust other teacher leaders. But, things quickly changed.
Two teachers placed their cars in front of the faculty parking lot to stop scabs from entering the building. They refused to move their cars unless they knew the staff coming into the parking lot. When the school administrators and security guards realized the striking teachers were not going to back down, they called the Los Angeles Police Department. These strikers still did not back down. They received citations for illegal parking. This later turned into a fundraiser to support those who received the fine.
Class struggle builds trust and unity
After this militant action, there was a stronger sense of trust and unity among the teachers and staff. One teacher who had previously sent out an angry, anti-communist email later sent an email encouraging the staff on strike to remain unified
and work together.In another incident, a scab tried to get into the parking lot and six teachers held the gate shut while security tried to open the gate. These teachers screamed “Scab Go Home!”
Actions like these continued for three days. On day four, three out of four scabs did not show up for the rest of the week, for fear of the strikers. This was a small victory at this school because it demonstrated the power of working-class unity.
Schools out, learning still in session
Not all teachers were yet won to taking such militant action, but they still found ways to contribute by talking to the parents dropping their kids off. They explained to parents and students about the teachers strike. Out of 1,300 enrolled students, less than 100 showed up to school by the end of the week. Some students came to school but were later picked up by their parents. Instead, many parents have supported the teachers and have sent their kids to join us in the morning rally.
Dozens of teachers have come to respect the leadership of this PL’er after he’s led more militant action on the picket line. No matter how sharp the class struggle becomes, only by leading with communist politics will we be able to grow and sustain growth. This strike has given us all the opportunity to deepen relationships while also discussing our ideas with hopes of bringing one or two teachers closer to Party.  
The inherent racism of LAUSD
That is just one school, but similar fights are happening throughout the city. Education workers are talking about how Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) refusal to spend their $2 billion reserve is callous. We moved the politics to the left by calling out the racist nature of these “austerity measures.” Although the LAUSD budget is the same for all schools, clearly the conditions within schools are not the same. Wealthy neighborhoods can fundraise for the needed personnel, but poor schools in Black and Latin neighborhoods are forced to accept LAUSD’s horrible policies, which include 42 students a class and a nurse only one day out of the week.
Education workers all around the city have wanted better learning conditions for years and are now saying they are ready to hold the picket lines for as long as necessary. When workers organize and fight back together, they get a taste of the power they have when they unite and fight back. We don’t have to accept the way things are. We can fight and we can win!
Mass support for strike
In fact, after multiple marches throughout the city of over 50,000 people each, the entire city is talking about the problems of this education system. According to a survey conducted by the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at LMU, over 80 percent of Los Angeles County supports the teachers’ strike (My News LA 01/19). Indeed, support has come in from all over the world. This shows us the need the working class has for examples of fight back and mass militant action against the ruling class and their racist education system.
After six days of striking, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union presented its first contract to education workers. “The deal includes caps on class sizes, and hiring full-time nurses for every school…a librarian for every middle and high school in the district by the fall of 2020…Next year a committee will develop a plan to reduce the number of assessments by half. The pro-charter school board agreed to vote on a resolution calling on the state to cap the number of charter schools. Teachers also won a 6 percent pay raise, but that was the same increase proposed by the district before the strike” (New York Times, 1/22).
As the LA strikers prepare to go back to school, education workers in Denver, Colorado and Oakland, Calif. are preparing to vote to strike.
More fights ahead
This strike forced the hand of LAUSD to provide some of what education workers were demanding (see full analysis of strike next issue). These hard-won gains by the education workers do not come close to providing what our working-class students deserve. The gains themselves expose the limits of capitalism: this system can never fulfill our demands for optimal learning conditions. If the strikers take what they learned from this class struggle to organize for the fightback ahead, this indeed is a victory!
The strikers feel empowered in this moment. It is our job now to take the contacts we made during the strike and strengthen the communist side of these new relationships.
The Progressive Labor Party will remain on the front lines of these struggles. We know the working class, as the producer of society, holds more power than the leeches of society, the ruling class. By fighting together, we will eventually abolish capitalism and build a youth- and worker-run society, communism.

INDIA, January 9— For two days, India’s 7,421 freight trains and 59,713 passenger cars did not move to any major cities. They could not move, because in places like the capital of the southwestern state of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, workers were sitting down on the tracks. As were their working class sisters and brothers in Chennai, in neighboring Tamil Nadu. As were workers 1,500 miles (2400 km) away in eastern Assam, bordering Bangladesh and Bhutan, where one quarter of India’s oil is produced. One third of the country’s working class - 150 million workers - were on strike!
‘Stop traffic and trains!’
Buses in Mumbai and Delhi, two of the world’s ten largest cities, with a combined population of nearly 50 million workers, did not move either. In Kolkata, the third largest city in India, transit workers protested inside train stations. Meanwhile in the country’s largest industrial zones like those in Chhattisgarh, workers joined from basic industries such as coal, iron, steel, aluminum, auto, machining, chemical, cement, and power generation.
Sprawling factories in the Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai industrial belts went idle as farmers, students, teachers, service workers like bank clerks, ‘anganwaldis’ (childcare) and healthcare workers—even non-unionized workers—joined workers in the streets in response to the unions’ command to ‘rail and rasta roko: “stop traffic and trains!”
The demands
A joint committee of nationwide labor unions, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), called the strike in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest “Labour Law” proposals to further weaken the ability of workers to unionize, to the point where labor unions will practically be illegal. Among the twelve strike demands were: stop the proposed “Labour Laws”; stop privatization of public transit; raise the minimum wage; institute price controls on the rising food costs; faster government recognition of new unions; abolish non-permanent and contract labor; and establish a social security fund for non-union workers.
Behind these demands, the conditions for this massive general strike (like the 180 million-strong strike in 2016) have been brewing at least since 1991. In 1991, India’s bosses turned to U.S. imperialism for foreign investment–which the World Bank provided–in exchange for massive restructuring of the Indian economy.
The changes brought astronomical profits for the bosses and mass misery for the workers. Dispossession brought mass internal migration, fueled by capitalist-provoked racist violence by growing Hindu-centric “Hindutva” fascist movements, guilty of massacres of Muslims and non-Hindi speakers, and racism against the “untouchable” Dalit caste. It’s no coincidence Narendra Modi’s Bharata Janatiya Party (BJP) formally embraced the Hindutva in the early 1990s.
Today, India’s working class has the worst sanitation, highest suicide rate, most malnourished children, and high rates of sexist attacks on women workers and gender-based violence. But the working class has not given up, and these strikes point our way to workers’ power.
‘The whole of Bengaluru sprung into the air…’
That’s because the strike also hurt India’s bosses in industries that weren’t even on strike. India is the world’s top exporter of information technology (IT) services, representing nearly eight per cent of India’s economy. At the center of India’s IT industry is Bengaluru (Bangalore). With 12.3 million workers, the bosses treasure it as the “Silicon Valley” of India. It is also home to some of India’s most important educational, aerospace and military research facilities.
And workers from every industry there brought it all to a grinding halt. The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), the “city’s lifeline…with a daily ridership of 45 lakh [450,000]” reported a 90 per cent reduction in service (Times of India, 1/9). Workers threw stones at the scabs still working, damaging 35 BMTC buses and twelve more state-run commuter buses, ensuring total shutdown. Even the prestigious universities that initially remained open were forced to close.
Bengaluru workers proved Marx correct once again: the working class cannot stir, cannot raise itself up without the entire capitalist system being sprung into the air.
Build PLP!
Progressive Labor Party salutes our striking sisters and brothers. The international working class needs that militant leadership now more than ever. Ultimately what our class needs most is mass international revolutionary communist leadership, which at the moment is absent among the multitude of nationalist fake leftist groups in India. Workers in India showed us again that we run the world. They showed the potential that as PLP grows around the world and links these struggles into a revolutionary communist movement of millions, the sooner we will smash these racist borders and control it.

KHARTOUM, SUDAN—“The regime is panicking! I have never seen them panicking like this.” That’s what an activist with Justice Africa said as massive protests erupted here in response to the government’s attempt to triple the price of bread and fuel. The protests started in the eastern city of Atbara, the former home of the Sudanese Communist Party, which was one of the most powerful communist parties in Africa or the Middle East.  The demonstrations quickly spread to six other cities, including the capital.
Like all workers’ struggles today, this fight in Sudan unfolds in a world where the rivalry between imperialists is the main factor shaping events.  For decades now, Sudan has been a crucial outpost for Chinese capitalists in their drive to challenge U.S. imperialism and establish themselves as a new center of gravity in the world economy. In 1995 President al-Bashir signed an important oil deal with the China, supporting their bid to establish energy access outside the military footprint of US imperialism’s Mid-East presence.  China now controls 75% of Sudanese oil output of 133,000 barrels a day (thediplomat.com, 6/17/18).
Over this same period of time U.S. imperialism has sought to answer growing Chinese influence in the region by backing a series of separatist/nationalist/fascist movements in Sudan fomenting instability and civil war at the expense of the lives of millions.  Following Sudan’s first oil discovery in 1978 civil war raged from 1983 to 2005. US imperialist running-dog politician John Garang, trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, received $20 million of military equipment in 1996 (Federation of American Scientists) helping to prolong a war which has displaced four million and killed two million of our working class brothers and sisters in the Sudan .  
Despite the false promises by the Darfur separatist movement, and the later secession of oil-rich South Sudan in 2011 to create the world’s most recent capitalist state,the workers of Sudan continue to pay the price for U.S. imperialism’s ongoing efforts to deny Chinese imperialist access to a stable outpost in Africa.  
Most recently the Trump administration has reversed course by lifting sanctions imposed on the al-Bashir regime as he has committed thousands of troops to the U.S.-backed Saudi coalition’s genocidal war in Yemen. This “integration” of Sudan’s economy into world trade has pried it open for IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment” policies, which always amount to an attack on workers.  In this case Wall Street demanded an end to subsidies that kept fuel and wheat more affordable, triggering the protests. Such subsidies, like all pro-worker policies capitalist governments implement, are relics of class struggle of prior generations.  Sudanese workers carry forward this tradition of class struggle today.  Similar protests over rising fuel and bread prices took place earlier in 2018 and in 2013 and were put down by security forces.
Police and army snipers opened fire on protesting workers and students, killing about 30, according to local journalists. The government arrested 14 leaders of the opposition National Consensus Forces, and shut down internet service and social media sites. Universities and schools in the capital were also closed as many demonstrators across the country demanded an end to the 30-year dictatorship.
Inflation reached an annual rate of 70 percent last November, leaving many Sudanese workers unable to buy food. Many have been standing in long lines and spending up to 40 percent of their income just on bread or sleeping in their cars for two days waiting to buy gas.
Workers in Sudan in struggle today against the al-Bashir regime must rebuild a communist movement that will correct the errors of its predecessors or their brave struggle against al-Bashir ‘s fascist state will be diverted into fighting for the interests of forces loyal either to U.S. or to Chinese imperialism.  Sudanese communists formed the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation in 1946 with a program of fighting for self-determination, national consciousness, and uniting all classes under the leadership of Sudanese workers and peasants in the fight for independence from British imperialism. With the abandonment of world revolution being pronounced from a USSR exhausted by its recent defeat  in World War II, Sudanese communists viewed socialist revolution as too distant a prospect to be presented to the masses, and all organizing was dedicated to the fight for independence (el-Amin, 1996 Middle Eastern Studies).  These nationalist errors by communists worldwide are analyzed more fully in Progressive Labor Party’s Road to Revolution III (1976).
More and more, Africa finds itself in the crosshairs of the growing rivalry between U.S. and Chinese imperialism. The result is more poverty, more terror and more war. Taking lessons from history, a new communist movement will rise up from the struggles of Sudan’s working class and this time finish the job that was started in Atbara more than 50 years ago.

BALTIMORE, January 5—A nearly unanimous “No way!” was the powerful answer to the confirmation of Mayor Catherine Pugh’s nominee, Joel Fitzgerald, as Baltimore’s next police commissioner. He would have been the City’s fifth top cop in less than four years since the Freddie Gray rebellion in 2015, which put fear in the hearts, and instability in the decision-making, of the local ruling class.
Several days before the City Council hearing, 11 West Wednesday protesters participated in the third monthly CHALLENGE Readers’ Discussion Group. (West Wednesdays are the continuing protests in response to the murder of Tyrone West in July 18, 2013.) One of the topics was about organizing speakers at the hearing, which we succeeded in doing!
Tawanda Jones, main organizer of the weekly West Wednesday rallies that demand accountability for her brother’s death and for all victims of police terror, declared to members of the City Council, about Fitzgerald, “Get him out, or we’ll push you out!”
Fitzgerald’s defining moment
The defining moment, in Fitzgerald’s career, was not the exaggeration and dishonesty in the resume he submitted for this job. Nor was it his racist response to a question about police-community relations: sometimes the best thing is to call an emergency pro-police “back the blue” rally, as he has done in Ft. Worth Texas, where he is currently police commissioner.
No, the defining moment was probably when Ft. Worth cop William Martin responded to a 911 call by Black woman Jacqueline Craig, who accused a white male neighbor of grabbing and choking her 7-year-old son. Shortly after arriving on the scene, Cop Martin forcefully shoved his taser into Ms. Craig’s back, and brutally arrested, not the neighbor, but Jacqueline and her two daughters. Even the Ft. Worth police internal investigation found Martin guilty of excessive force.
Commissioner Fitzgerald de facto let Cop Martin get away. Martin was docked two weeks pay. Fitzgerald instead demoted who commanders for releasing the video revealing the violence against Jacqueline and her family. This led to outrage and protests. In other words, Fitzgerald was far more upset about the truth getting out, than he was about racist police terror. His handling of that crisis was his defining moment.
Speak out at City Council hearing
If he became Baltimore’s police chief, killer cops here would be even more emboldened. That’s why it’s reasonable to argue that shutting down the Fitzgerald confirmation will probably result in prevenient murder of working-class lives in Baltimore. And we did shut it down! Two days after the City Council hearing, Fitzgerald withdrew himself from consideration.
Among the 70 speakers, many focused on advocating for various reforms: calling for a home-grown police commissioner, more community policing with foot patrols, no reinstitution of the deadly “jump out boys,” and no “Back the Blue” rallies.
No use in reforming wage slavery
The limiting the goal to an effort for reforming capitalism is equivalent to folks during slavery trying only to limit the length of whips. Clearly, the bigger goal—complete abolition of slavery—was the necessary focus.
The same is true today. We need to abolish this system of wage slavery. Progressive Labor Party upholds the communist view that as long as capitalism is the framework, vicious policing of the masses is essential to the survival of this system. Trying to control and repress the working class, by way of violence and terror, is the sword of this vastly unequal system. Only a relentless marathon towards a communist society can cut off racist police at its knees.
Over time, we plan to back up sharp words with unified mass action against politricksters, the Klan in blue, and all the other treacherous attacks of capitalism.