HAITI, Sept 7—Solidarity must be at the heart of what it means to be a communist. Communism is not only a political and economic system, it is also a way of life. Building an international revolutionary communist party means breaking the boundaries of racism, sexism, social division of labor and economic inequalities fueling the life of workers-all barriers created by capitalism to divide and alienate the working class.
Therefore, communists must develop our line through our everyday lives, along with developing trust between communists and the working class. This summer, PLP here continued to experience and develop that solidarity with North American communists and friends and relatives.
We relied on our friends to help overcome some logistical difficulties. A young friend drove our visitors to the lodging. He had a drink with us and joined in a lively discussion about the current level of class struggle in Haiti. We accompanied the U.S. comrades everywhere: tired, a comrade felt a cold coming on; right away, a friend brought her leaves and honey to prepare a cure.
On a short journey out of town, a doctor friend drove and stayed overnight with us, and we ate and drank together, talking late into the night, strengthening our ties. For other visits, we traveled in a pickup other friends provided for us. Together we visited a retired worker from the U.S.  trying to build a social service center in a small rural community. We shared the comforts and discomforts (Some had to ride in the back of the truck). For several days, we traveled  together, sharing food, drink, music, and talk, talk, talk! Three to four people shared a dish or a bottle of water.
During our journey we became friendly with many people we met on the road. When we were told that the mother of a new comrade had just passed away,  we even shared gifts: on arrival, the U.S. comrades brought some dried fish (a specialty from another region of Haiti that had been visited) to the mother of one comrade and she gave them some casave, a specialty from her town, to them on their departure; they also gave books and textbooks for the daughter of the friend who drove for us, and for another girl in her family.
For the last two days we cooked together, struggled with one another on the daily work of the Party, strengthening our ideological understanding of racism, sexism, armed struggle, poverty, the class struggle and the prospects for building our Party.
In our Party, we want to build lives together in free and full solidarity today without any form of inequality among our ranks. Join us! Long live communism, long live the PLP.

…Not only are conditions worse today than they were during Attica,… Attica once again…. is synonymous with prisoner resistance.
—Heather Ann Thompson, history professor at the University of Michigan, (Jacobin, 9/9)

NEW YORK, September 9—Forty-five years ago, Black imprisoned workers led their white and Latin counterparts in a rebellion against the racist deplorable conditions at Attica prison in northwestern New York State. Today prisoners nationwide are organizing once again. Capitalism is a never-ending disaster.  For workers, students and prisoners worldwide only communism is a solution: a world without racism, sexism or imperialist wars.
Concentration Camp
In September of 1971, the conditions at Attica prison in the northwest corner of New York State were brutal. Inmates suffered from starving bellies, untreated infections, falling teeth, lack of toilet paper, and showers only once a week often without any soap (Jacobin, 9/9). With about 2,300 inmates, Attica was overcrowded to almost twice its capacity. The prisoner population was 54 percent Black, 9 percent Puerto Rican and 37 percent white. All 383 guards were white.
So the prisoners organized. They read Marx and Frantz Fanon. They formed the Attica Liberation Faction uniting different political groupings. They had educational rap sessions in the prison yard. They put together demands for improved conditions and sent them to state, city and prison officials. All demands for change by the prisoners were ignored.
Rebellion
After a prisoner fought back against a brutal guard, the prison bosses ordered a crackdown that led to a violent fight. The prison guard was beaten and eventually died. But a small group of more politicized prisoners immediately changed it into an organized rebellion. Meetings were held, demands were discussed and formulated, and leaders were chosen. A central part of the prison called Times Square was fortified. They chose a negotiation committee. They figured out how to feed 1,300 people and obtained medical care for those most in need.
Rockefeller’s Fascist Savagery
But New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller and various authorities were not interested in negotiations. They had a two-pronged racist strategy: spread vicious lies about the rebellious prisoners and viciously attack them as soon as possible. Both the media and various officials spread racist lies about supposed atrocities committed by the rebels, including slitting the throats of the hostages. The attack by the state involved hundreds of state cops, National Guardsmen, and both current and former prison guards. They were handed weapons from a supply truck without regard to serial numbers and they had their own personal weapons.
Road to Mass Incarceration
The attack started with a gas that incapacitated the rebelling prisoners. This was followed by fifteen minutes of indiscriminate shooting that slaughtered 29 prisoners and 9 guards. After the prison was totally secured, four more prisoners-leaders of the rebellion- were hunted down and killed. That was followed by vicious beatings, torture and no medical care. Heather Ann Thompson: “In the aftermath is when the real brutality begins. The doctors are trying to help prisoners, while guards are dumping them off of stretchers, kicking them, urinating into wounds, making the most horrific scene unfold.” (Democracy Now, 7/9).
President Richard “Nixon repeatedly assured Rockefeller he did the right thing, because Attica was “the Blacks,” and part of a nationwide conspiracy by the communists and Black radicals to undermine [U.S.]” (truth-out, 9/9). Within a year, Rockefeller enacted a law that formed the seeds of the “war on drugs” (racist war on workers) operation.
Attica scared the bosses, and they reacted with more terrorization of the Black and Latin working class. In 1970, the year before Attica, there were nearly 200,000 people in prison. By 2015, that number to 2.3 million people, a 400 percent increase in the rate of incarceration (Five-Thirty-Eight, 2/12/16).
Attica is a symbol of working-class rebellion and viciously racist aftermath. Attica today means fight back against racist state terror.
Prisons can be a site of struggle and fightback. At the Kinross Correctional Facility in Michigan 400 prisoners protested today to commemorate Attica. And more are organizing again against deplorable prison conditions throughout the country. Nationwide protests are growing against racism and sexism. More than ever, we need to fight for communism to end these capitalist atrocities once and for all.

Phyllis Schlafly, presidential candidate Donald Trump’s hero, a leading architect of conservatism in the twentieth century died in early September. Schlafly was a committed anti-communist, racist, and sexist. But, what she is known for the most is her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would have banned denial of rights due to sex. Schlafly campaigned against the ERA, and won many working women to join the fight, arguing a women’s place is in the house with the kids. Of course, this denies the reality of the millions of working class women who worked. However, it maintained the ruling class lie that working was optional for women, and helped them keep women’s pay low.
Sexism, like racism, is a necessary part of capitalism. Women still earn less than men (79 cents to every dollar men earn,) and that pay differential leads to tremendous profits for the bosses. While the ruling class has allowed some changes for women (the right to vote in 1920, the ability to open bank accounts or get a mortgage without a husband’s approval in the 60s and 70s), these have not changed  the economic reality for most working-class women.
Schlafly helped build the conservative wing of the Republican party, which brought us the trickle-down economics of Ronald Reagan and the consolidated racist politics of the party since the 1960s. She helped build a movement to counter working-class fightback. Schlafly is a clear example how ruling-class women are perpetrators of sexist oppression for the working class.

Turkey’s August 24 assault on northern Syria, its first direct involvement in a five-year-old proxy war, points to even more instability in the Middle East—and U.S. imperialists’ precarious position there..
Turkey’s bosses, who are critical to U.S. control over the region’s vast oil reserves, have become unreliable allies. By sending tanks and troops into Syria and authorizing airstrikes over the border, Erdogan has “transformed this horrific war into a completely unpredictable battlefield” in which “the Russians would seem to have gained the most” (Der Spiegel, 8/26). The threat of a global conflict is closer to reality, as noted by the main-wing U.S. bosses’ mouthpiece of choice, the New York Times:

Because Syria has sucked in two of the world’s leading military powers, Russia and the United States, [the situation] could most likely be cleared only by a full-scale invasion. In the best case, this would require something akin to the yearslong American occupations of Iraq or Afghanistan. In the worst, invading a war zone where so many foreign adversaries are active could ignite a major regional war (NYT, 8/26).

For the millions of workers murdered and displaced in Syria, the horror of wider war is already a reality. Rival imperialists in the U.S., Russia and China are seeking to divide and conquer the world. With smaller imperialists like Iran and Turkey armed to the teeth on the big powers’ behalf, workers in these countries are slaughtered, forced to fight in the bosses’ interests, or turned into refugees.
Regardless of the nation, large or small, capitalists have no allegiance to the working class—including workers within the bosses’ borders. Their only loyalty is to the profit system—to control over markets and resources, and to racist, sexist super-exploitation. Communists in Progressive Labor Party have but one allegiance: to liberate the international working class by smashing the capitalist class, along with their borders, imperialism and racist police terror. Our aim is armed revolution by a working-class red army.
Why Turkey Matters to U.S. Imperialism
Bordering Greece to the west, Syria to the south, and Iraq and Iran to the east, Turkey bridges the Middle East with southeastern Europe and central Asia, and links the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Controlling this vital crossroads was U.S. imperialism’s top priority after World War II. In 1947, when a communist-led armed insurrection against British and U.S. imperialism in Greece inspired workers across Turkey, the U.S. poured in money and weapons to strengthen the Nazi-like Turkish bosses.
In return, Turkey’s rulers condemned thousands of communist-led workers to prison, then helped the U.S. build its imperialist NATO military alliance. Turkey is now the Middle East’s largest economy and fields the second largest army in NATO, behind the U.S. The recent U.S. “peace” deal with Iran was intended to buy time for U.S. bosses to withdraw from the Middle East and rebuild its military, leaving Turkey’s bosses as their well-armed stand-in (CHALLENGE, 2/10). As explained by George Friedman, arch-imperialist advisor to the Pentagon, noted, “The only country capable of being a counterbalance to Iran and a potential long-term power in the region is Turkey” (Stratfor, 11/24/14).
The Turkish bosses’ recent actions call into question these long-term plans. Day by day, U.S. imperialism seems to be reacting to events more than controlling them. Capitalist “allies” constantly fall out; any unity is temporary.
No Honor Among Thieves
On August 9, using alleged U.S. complicity in the aborted July coup in Turkey as a pretext, Erdogan visited his “dear friend,” Russian president Vladimir Putin, and promised to restore diplomatic and economic ties. On August 21, Turkey’s government suggested Russia’s military “might also wish” to use Incirlik Air Base, a critical NATO facility and the decades-long home to a U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal (Anadolu News, 8/20). Days later, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to meet with Erdogan and “smooth over” tensions (NYT, 8/25). Biden was snubbed, however. He was met at the airport by only the deputy mayor of Ankara, Turkey’s capital city. Unknown to the U.S., Turkey had already begun its invasion of Syria (Asia Times, 8/26).
Michael Maloof, a senior analyst in the U.S. Defense Department during the 2003 Iraq genocide, believes that Erdogan “has given up on NATO and even the EU and is pivoting more towards the East” (rt.com, 8/18). It remains to be seen how far Turkey’s bosses will go in playing U.S. and Russian bosses off against each other, as they did Allied and German bosses during World War II. What’s clear is that a Russia-Turkey alliance—and Turkey’s acceptance of Syria President Bashar al-Assad staying in power in a “transitional” role—could make it appear “as though the United States is the lone irrational outlier in Syria...However Russia responds to Turkey’s proposals, it will help determine the trajectory of the Syrian conflict” Stratfor (8/12/16).
In any event, the U.S. bosses have every reason to be nervous. In their eagerness to save face and downplay any splits with Turkey, a U.S. State Department spokesperson maintained that Biden and Erdogan had a “good and fruitful meeting”—one full day before they actually met (Sputnik News, 8/24).
Build PLP to Smash Imperialism
The proxy clash between U.S. and Russian imperialists over Syria has already created the largest refugee crisis in history. While U.S. imperialism stands in relative decline versus a resurgent Russia and a rising China, it still far outmatches them in military strength. The U.S. bosses will not give up their empire without an all-out war.
Meanwhile, smaller-scale capitalists in organized crime prey on vulnerable workers with impunity. The United Nations has documented women workers facing systematic rape, sexual abuse, and abduction in refugee camps. Gangs are selling pre-adolescent girls to wealthy men in Jordan, or burning their faces to make them undesirable to criminal militias backed by the U.S., Russia and Iran (Guardian, 7/25). Thousands of young men are conscripted at gunpoint as cannon fodder for those same militias.
The tasks of communists and friends of PLP include raising these ideas and selling CHALLENGE at our workplaces. Every CHALLENGE subscription sold is another nail in the bosses’ coffin. We must organize study groups to analyze a world in which every sharpening attack on our class is connected to inter-imperialist rivalry. Further, we need to organize rallies in solidarity with our class sisters and brothers in the Middle East. The more communist ideas become mass ideas among soldiers, students and workers, the more we can take these ideas all the way to seizing state power—to free our class once and for all!