NEW YORK CITY, July 25—As I began my training for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) as a track worker, there has been a lot of safety talk at orientation and training. The indoctrination has begun, and the first order of business is making sure that workers know safety is our responsibility, and ours alone.
The topic came up about our fallen MTA brother St. Clair Richards-Stephens who was murdered by dangerous working condition in March 2018. He was a track worker who tripped, grabbed a handrail that broke, and fell to his death. The company and the union both stuck to their lame response to questions about his death: “Well we don’t know all the facts yet. This is why we say safety begins with you. But there’s still an ongoing investigation. What we can say is that he was a big guy.” They speak as if it were his fault that the wooden handrail didn’t support his weight, rather than emphasize the fact that wooden handrails have been proven unreliable!
During the “safety training”, the trainer informed us of lead paint in our work areas, wooden catwalks and handrails still in use. He described the many ways workers continue to get hurt by getting their fingers cut off, falling off elevated structures, or getting struck by trains. Yet, he claimed 90 percent of workers’ injuries are caused by our actions and the other 10 percent are from working conditions. Of those 10 percent, he claimed, “The only time when working conditions become unsafe is through acts of nature, like storms.”
At this point, I knew the instructor was full of it. He is paid to brainwash workers into believing injures are mainly caused by the workers and not the bosses that exploit them. I asked, “Couldn’t we improve upon the unsafe working areas to make them more safe?”
He said, “But we are designed to fail being victims of probability.” He began to use an exercise with numbers to prove his point, saying once you get used to something and it suddenly changes, you’re unable to adapt before your mistake is made.  
A co-worker defended the instructor, “We will never be able to completely ensure everyone’s safety. Not even in a perfect world could we ensure everyone’s safety, that’s what he’s trying to say!”
I disagreed: “It is possible to ensure everyone’s safety! For example, getting a G.O. (general order) to shut down service on one track can prevent anyone from getting struck by a train, or we can get safety nets for those who work on elevated structures.”
The instructor initially agreed, then he again parroted his boss’s lie and said, “Safety is hard to control because humans are hard to fix.”
I realized this wasn’t an argument I could win. I approached my co-workers on break to ask them what they thought.
 “I understand what he means but I’m too tired to really think about it,” one worker said. He’s onto something. That’s another trouble the MTA puts us through. The training was from 3-11pm. The day before, our schedule was 7am-3pm. A recent training required us to work from 10 pm-6 am. Our schedules are in constant fluctuation, making us tired and less able to think critically. This jeopardizes us workers and the riders who depend on us for transportation.  
I persisted in my point about ensuring the workers’ safety. An individual may be flawed, but as a collective, we’re strong. In factories in other countries like Russia and China where the workers took state power in the last century, workers were able to dramatically reduce injuries because profit wasn’t the driving force of labor, necessity was. It’s capitalism that is at fault 100 percent of the time! After my rant, my coworkers agreed.  “True, true,” one co-worker said.
It’s hard struggling against the bosses’ lies, especially when “the experts” present them. It’s a long fight, and we won’t win them all, but what’s important is that we drop the seeds for others to find and pick up. Stay patient, brothers and sisters, for the workers are always listening to what we say, and to what we don’t say. Stand tall! The fight continues.

 CHICAGO, July 7—Today, 3,000 people shut down the main Chicago expressway, the Dan Ryan. They challenged the racist myth that Black and Latin youth responsible for high gun violence in their communities. It’s actually mass unemployment and school closings, symtoms of capitalist inequality, that lead to gun violence.
Chicago Strong, a youth group tied to a local Catholic Church, led the march. It was an inspiring day for communists in PLP. We were present with our mass organizations and we distributed hundreds of CHALLENGEs.
Many workers who marched understand some of the underlying reasons why violence exists in our neighborhoods. They also understand the extreme racist nature of capitalism. What is unclear is how to solve these problems. This march, orchestrated by the Chicago ruling class, pushed for reforms that workers have been losing for decades.
Reformists expose their tie to pols and the state
Chicago Strong demans’ include resources for our communities, national “common-sense gun laws,” jobs, and schools. Its march was endorsed by Chicago’s racist mayor, Rahm Emanuel. It is he who has led the charge to push ten of thousands of Black workers from Chicago. It is he who has shut down more than 50 schools and has attacked the Chicago Teachers’ Union. It is he who blocks police reform that tries to make his rabid racist beasts (aka Chicago Police Department) more accountable.
But these facts didn’t stop Reverend Michael Pfleger, the leader of the march, from linking arms with Eddie Johnson, chief of the  racist, murderous CPD. Plenty of liberal  politicians also posed for pictures. Sellout union leaders organized some of their members to march. There were many churches represented in the massive crowds; some came as far as 60 miles away. There were also students from Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in February. This spawned mass Democrat-led and mainly-white protests against gun violence.
Black and Latin youth feel the brunt of crisis
The liberal wing of the ruling class has attempted to turn the anti-gun violence protests into an attack on Black youth in Chicago. The main perpetrators of gun violence is still the police and the injustice system that protects them. Yet, the racist media focuses on gang violence.
In recent years the attacks on Black and Latin workers in Chicago has intensified. Mass unemployment and underemployment, and mass school closings accompanied with “War on Drugs” policies, have bred neighborhood violence. Youth unemployment for Black male workers ages 16 to 19 is over 80 percent, the group mostly impacted by gun violence here (Chicago Tribune 2018).
Another major factor of rising violence in neighborhoods stems from the city’s attack on education through mass school closings. Remaining schools are overcrowded and depleted of therapists and counselors.
The mayor and his capitalist cronies have no solutions for young Black and Latin workers. As they turn former public school buildings into luxury lofts, it is clear our class has become disposable. No jobs, no functioning schools, just more police as the city still pushes forward to build its cop academy. It is our job as communists to make the connections between gun violence in our communities to this capitalist system. Prayers and “friendly” politicians cannot fix a problem that capitalism is solely responsible for.
We cannot let any gun law reform be another way to target and terrorize Black and Latin working-class youth!
Capitalism in crisis headed for more fascism and war
This march represented the main wing of the ruling class trying to mobilize workers to support liberal capitalism. They want us to trust the Democratic Party to solve the very problems that they created. That’s why Pfleger, Jesse Jackson, and other misleaders fixate on worker-on-worker violence and embrace the racist CPD. We must shove these hypocrites out of the way. They will deliver us to the hands of the capitalist bosses who are hell bent on saving their tottering world empire on our backs.
They will try to discipline their class as well as us. One way or the other the rulers will need more soldiers to fight their enemies worldwide. Trump’s gutter racism is a hard sell to mobilize Black and Latin soldiers. The lack of jobs makes enlisting a virtual economic draft. Later, if need be, a real draft may be needed.  This is the future: war and fascism.
Capitalism is incapable of being reformed or fixed. It will always need racist terror and violence to rule. Chicago Strong’s demands are a pipe dream meant to convince us that this deadly system has a future. But despite the misleadership present, this multiracial group of workers showed the working class’s potential to unite and shut this system down. Join the revolutionary communist party, PLP!

 The following report is from the Puerto Rico Brigade, where over 20 students and community college professors from the U.S. contributed their labor and their international solidarity to the working class devastated by Hurricane Maria. On their Brigade, the group met families occupying a school that was threatened with closure.

PUERTO RICO, July 22—“Who has the power? Grandmothers have the power!” So spoke one of the grandmothers occupying a public school in Toa Baja. Parents and teachers have been camping out at the school daily to ensure that equipment is not removed from the school at night by the school board. Parents have been calling press conferences and organizing rallies to keep their neighborhood schools open.
But while the capitalists have been exposed for closing schools and “reassigning” teachers (to nonteaching “special jobs”), working-class communities have learned to rely on each other to rebuild and fight back. The struggle to fight for education is the prime evidence of working-class unity—students, teachers and parents repairing schools and organizing protests across the island to protest the capitalist agenda to sell the island piece meal at the expense of its youth and working class.  
As the Brigade who volunteered this summer in Puerto Rico, we were able to participate and support the working-class fightback and occupations of local schools slated to be closed. Progressive Labor Party members brought the message of international solidarity and the need for revolution to teachers and families. Families were tremendously welcoming to PLP and its communist ideas.
School building rented for a dollar
The failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the working class is on full display here. The much-hated Secretary of Education Julia Keheler (annual salary $250,000) is calling for the closure of 400 schools in two years. She blames low student enrollment when in reality, Keheler is working hand in glove with developers to take over Puerto Rico.
The policy of privatization presents a golden egg for these capitalists who are able to feed off public funds in the name of “austerity” (read: cutbacks). Last year, 179 public schools were shuttered and 150 more were closed from 2010 to 2015 (Huffington Post, 4/6).
The public schools are often in attractive locations for developers, who have close ties to the government. Some schools have already been told they will be closed to create “offices.” Others are close to beach or tourist attractions. The Julia Burgos School in Carolina was shut down and then rented for $1/year to a financier who then reopened it as a private school. The mural dedicated to Puerto Rican writer Julia Burgos inside the school was immediately removed.
Finance capital bosses are descending on Puerto Rico like hawks.
There are big names among them: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Perella Weinberg Partners and TPG Capital. What’s luring them is the opportunity to scoop up home loans and foreclosed properties for pennies on the dollar (Bloomberg, 7/14/17).
School closure (and home foreclosures) is one of the many ways the barbarous bosses use a crisis as an opportunity for business schemes and to slash and burn any benefits the working class has gained through past fightbacks.
Racist Disregard
The massive closure of schools that will affect Latin youth also paves the wave for charter schools, which receive public funds but are privately operated. Law 85, recently enacted, dictates that 10 percent of Puerto Rico’s schools should be charters. Charters here have high turnover, high segregation rates, and bad teaching conditions.
Education workers with the Federación de Maestras de Puerto Rico (FMPR) correctly blame the finance capital bosses. Billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jonathan Sackler (family owner of big pharma Purdue Pharma) and the DeVos family foundation for pushing to cut any remaining benefits for the working class in favor of lining their own pockets. (Betsy DeVos is the current Secretary of Education).
We salute the fightback spirit of our working-class sisters and brothers in Puerto Rico, who have been leading massive fightbacks throughout the island. They exposed how the strategy of the school closings also aims to divide parents, by leaving some schools untouched and closing others.
Attack on disabled students
Many of the 400 schools up for closure have high percentages of students with disabilities. According to a U.S. Department of Education report, approximately 25 percent of students in Puerto Rico have one or more disabilities. Many of the schools targeted have excellent facilities for students with disabilities, according to their parents. Charter schools here are known for their refusal to accept students with disabilities
One example is an elementary school in the Toa Baja municipality, where eight people died in the flooding from last year’s hurricanes. The town suffered the onslaught of sea surges and torrential rain. Levies from a nearby lagoon were opened to prevent them from breaking. The school survived intact with little damage and the neighborhood united to clean and prepare it for returning students.
A few months ago, the same school received notice they were on the list of closure. Parents and teachers are outraged at the Department of Education. The government is forcing children, 56 percent of whom have a disability, to a distant facility with fewer resources and staff. The new school didn’t even have bathrooms for the preschool children. When parents protested, the department representative said children could use the floor mat as a bathroom. “Like an animal!” one parent angrily remarked. “This is how capitalists treat our children, like animals.”
Same Struggle, Same Fight
The militancy of the working class here is clear and the potential to get involved in the class struggle is great. Teachers and students from various community colleges had the honor of supporting these school struggles. From the South Bronx to Toa Boja, workers struggles have no borders.

Obama has a proposal for the Democratic Party and for the imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class. He laid it out in a “lecture” to a crowd of 15,000 supporters in Johannesburg, South Africa on the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth. Obama’s plan involves stopping Trumpism (though Trump is never named) and restoring the liberal world order dominated by the U. S. rulers.
Obama starts by observing that in 1918 when Mandela was born colonialism was alive and well, with the great powers mobilizing mass racist sentiment in service of imperial expansion and rivalry.  Of course, he overlooks the world-shaking Bolshevik Revolution where the communist-led working class took power in Russia and disrupted the imperialist world order. 
It was this anti-imperialist, socialist revolution in October 1917 that inspired Mandela and many other communist and nationalist liberation movements in Africa and throughout the world. The racist Jim-Crow segregation and murderous exploitation of Black workers in the southern United States inspired no one.
Obama mentions these liberation movements as though they represent the continuing progress of capitalism and liberal democracy toward a wonderful world for all. Actually these movements represent some reforms that were rather quickly taken away by capitalist rulers. These liberation movements failed the workers. They succeeded for some local capitalists.
Racist hypocrite
So what is Obama’s plan to improve life in Africa?  His foundation is mentoring 200 young people from journalists, to small entrepreneurs to educational leaders. He does mention China as a full-grown rival, but says nothing about China’s Silk Road plan that is transforming much of the infrastructure in Africa to align with China’s imperialist needs. Obama’s foundation stands little chance to stop China’s economic dominance in Africa.
Further Obama does not mention that China, Russia and the U. S. are increasing their military presence in Africa. He failed to mention his military imperialist expansion on the continent, including drone bombings and drone bases, in Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, and Tunisia.
In reality Obama is proposing a political plan to make U. S. imperialism look good around the world as it prepares for more wars with its imperialist rivals.
Obama moves on to commit the gross and foul distortion of equating the collapse of the already capitalist Soviet Union in 1989 with the collapse of apartheid that same year. Both systems, he claims, amounted to an assault on individual human dignity.  Yet apartheid, from the start, was dedicated to racial supremacy, while the collapse of the USSR ended the first attempt to building an egalitarian society in which hundreds of millions, if not billions worldwide, still yearn to live. It is precisely that society, communism that Obama is careful to reject in his effort to map out the road ahead. 
Inclusive capitalism
Instead, he calls for “inclusive capitalism”—progressive taxation, public education, universal health care, and a role for organized labor.
Obama then focuses on the U. S. ruling class. They are still far too unpatriotic and they are running away with society’s wealth. They have no sense of duty to their nation, no appetite for sacrifice.  Yet he willfully refuses to acknowledge any role whatsoever his eight years in power played in further concentrating wealth in fewer hands coming out of the 2008 crisis. Obama’s “inclusive capitalism” is a call for discipline of the bosses. He paints the rise of nationalism worldwide as a failure on the part of ruling classes to contain the alienation that runaway inequality has engendered. Divided societies cannot confront major adversaries. This is the great ruling class fear Obama articulates. This is a playbook for major war, war that mobilizes entire societies.
Obama’s “inclusive capitalism” includes national borders, massive deportations, and immigrants assimilating.  He quotes Mandela to promote all class unity: “[t]o make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner.”  
Yet life for Black workers in South Africa is worse than ever.
This one line sums up a major error of the old communist movement. Working with the enemy means more capitalist misery for workers and South Africa is a prime example of that. As Democrats and people on the “left” call for our votes, we must stick to our guns, the long, difficult road to workers power, communism.