WASHINGTON, DC, April 9—At the Metro transit system in D.C. (WMATA), PLP is fighting back and leading the struggle against management’s cutbacks, racist disciplinary procedures, sellout union leaders, and ultimately, capitalism itself.
Today, we joined transit workers in a rally in front of the Jackson Graham Building (management headquarters) to protest a forum on rider assaults on bus operators. The forum was co-sponsored by management and traitorous union misleaders.
For years, transit workers in D.C. have been facing cutbacks and attacks from the management bosses. A program of austerity has threatened pensions and wages, which were won primarily through the militant communist-led wildcat strike of the 1970s. Metro bosses have also intensified attacks on workers through a new racist discipline matrix that primarily targets Black workers, and a vicious new background check policy that reaches back decades and has led to multiple firings of veteran drivers. Recently, workers who have acted in self-defense after being attacked by bus riders are themselves fired or otherwise punished! These racist assaults are part and parcel of the broader capitalist scheme to intimidate workers and rob them of any gains won and defended through direct class struggle. Our enemy is not the riders, but this capitalist system. Riders and workers must unite to challenge the transit bosses!
To throw salt on the open wound, WMATA management and their cronies and class-collaborators in the union have called for ridiculous policy reforms to address the string of rider-instigated attacks on bus operators and other workers. Management has suggested placing cops on buses to monitor behavior and has even printed pamphlets urging workers to practice restraint when dealing with riders. All this, as if workers are not capable of defending themselves and intelligent enough to know how to act in confrontational situations! More importantly, the bosses are trying to pit us against our natural allies, the working-class riders, while fomenting a false unity with our class enemies: the bosses and the cops.
Anger was high at the rally. One bus operator said that we should go inside and disrupt the meeting. The bus operator correctly pointed out that workers have the numbers and power to confront capitalist bosses and union misleaders.
KKKops Off Buses
Throughout the rally, we led militant chants such as “bosses can’t profit when workers strike, shut it down, shut it tight!” We demanded that WMATA address more fundamental issues regarding the assaults on bus operators. We refused cops on buses. Such a policy would entrench the blatantly racist role of police officers as overseers of the working class. The rally instead called for fully subsidized transit fare as a solution to many transit problems, including the assaults on operators. If the bosses were serious about working-class safety and health, transportation would be free. Not only would such a reform benefit the working class of DC, but separating the job of fare collection from that of actually operating the bus means that riders would have little incentive to attack operators for problems regarding their fare. Of course, the bosses’ refusal only exposes their role, which is to exploit and divide the working class.
Another rally was planned that is intended to stop traffic. We will continue to fight for better working conditions and an end to racist and sexist attacks., PLP will continue to work with these workers to turn their reform struggles into the fight for a communist world.
Progressive Labor Party will once again march for communism and celebrate May Day, the historic international workers’ holiday. The capitalist bosses say communism is dead. The masses of workers about to demonstrate around the world—taking leadership from PLP—say otherwise. The lessons of history are clear. Only communism can smash the racist and sexist inequalities of the rotten profit system. Only communism can foster an egalitarian world run by and for workers, or develop a society based on workers’ needs.
Never has our task been more urgent. Consider just a few of the latest deadly capitalist attacks on the working class:
- The inter-imperialist proxy war in Syria has displaced more than 11 million people, half of them children.
- Recent earthquakes in Japan and Ecuador have left hundreds dead, thousands injured, and countless homeless. The United States imperialists have responded by sending troops. If the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa are any indications, we can expect more fascism in the wake of these crises.
- In response to the Zika virus outbreak, capitalist rulers in Latin America are waging a victim-blaming campaign against working-class women and families. In Brazil, troops are going door to door, warning people to refrain from sex and avoid pregnancies. As in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 storm that struck Cuba, Jamaica, and the U.S. eastern seaboard, the government response has focused on the “personal responsibility” of the victims, rather than the failure of capitalist infrastructure and public health.
As growing numbers of workers are devastated, inter-imperialist rivalry drives the world toward an inevitable collision—a broader global war—between super-powers China, Russia, and the United States, along with their shifting alignments of allies. As the U.S. “pivots” toward Asia, China is doing the same in Latin America, expanding its investments and influence in the backyard of U.S. imperialism. As China builds new air and naval bases and lays claim to international waters in the South China Sea, the U.S. counters with an “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement” with the Philippines. As the U.S. backs openly neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine, Russia escalates the nuclear arms race by developing intercontinental ballistic missiles with independently targetable warheads.
No corner of the globe is safe from capitalist horrors. Faced with rising working-class anger, the imperialist bosses are desperately trying to divide and mislead workers with their political puppets, from gutter racist Donald Trump and phony “socialist” Bernie Sanders in the U.S., to fake-left parties like Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, to fascist movements like PEGIDA in Germany, the National Front in France, or Greece’s goose-stepping Golden Dawn. The list of capitalist reform “solutions” to capitalist crises is endless. But none of them ever work, because none of them confront the root of the problem: the profit system itself.
A Proud History of Working-Class Rebellion
The international working class has always fought back against the capitalist bosses.
In 1791, slaves in San Domingo rebelled against slavery and colonialism. In 1804, they successfully ended slavery and established Haiti—an inspiration to slaves in the U.S. Under courageous leaders like Nat Turner and John Brown, violent rebellions struck at the heart of chattel slavery and spread fear among the slave-holder class.
Workers in Paris have their own long history of fightback against capitalism. In 1789, the French Revolution overthrew the parasitic monarchy and abolished feudalism. Amid economic crisis and imperial rule, they succeeded in 1871 in creating the Paris Commune, the first seizure of state power by class-conscious workers, many of them dedicated to internationalist and communist ideas. In May 1886, the Paris Commune inspired workers in Chicago to fight for the eight-hour day in what is known as the Haymarket Square Riot. Led in large part by communists devoted to the destruction of capitalism, against a backdrop of murderous police violence and extreme exploitation, this multiracial movement mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the U.S. and gave birth to our modern May Day. The capitalist class never stops trying to distort and hide workers’ history of fightback. They try to tell us that our class is powerless. But we know better. We know that millions of workers have paved the way for us to continue to fight for a better world—a world without bosses, profits, sexism, racism, or imperialist war. Working-class fightback continues!
The bosses’ media have failed in their efforts to conceal the growing fightback around the world. Over the last year in Haiti, workers led mass demonstrations by the thousands, rocking the government by demanding the ouster of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Evans Paul, along with lower prices for gas and the removal of the criminal forces of the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH). Thousands took to the streets of Port-au-Prince to chant, “The gas thief in the prime minister’s office has to go! Do you hear that, Obama? Do you hear that, Bill Clinton?” The working class in Haiti clearly sees the connection between their local capitalist thugs and arch-imperialists like Barack Obama and the Clintons. Students and workers of Haiti had the correct response to a presidential runoff election that the bosses were forced to cancel in January: Don’t vote, rebel!
Last fall, in South Africa, a mass, student-led rebellion pressed for free education for all and forced the government to cancel planned tuition hikes. The fightback spread to university workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, who are paid an unlivable minimum wage—just one example of the racist inequalities that have endured despite the abolition of legalized apartheid. Led by militant students and workers, masses are striking against the outsourcing of university jobs and for a livable wage and improved water and sanitation services. In Asia, the working class is exploding with anger, as workers refuse to remain slaves to a system that cheats, steals and poisons them with toxic air and water. In industries across China in 2015, according to the China Labour Bulletin, there were more than 2,700 strikes and protests over withheld wages and health benefits and mass layoffs. Let’s not forget that the struggle also continues in Ferguson, Missouri, where Mike Brown was murdered by a kkkop in 2014. Women workers are leading the charge in Ferguson and also in New York City, where Kyam Livingston, Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray—among many other victims of the racist, criminal injustice system—are not forgotten.
In the U.S., even as we go to press, Verizon workers are on strike yet again to fight against a wage cut. Although we understand that capitalism can never be reformed to serve workers’ needs, strikes are valuable schools for class struggle—and powerful demonstrations of the potential of workers’ power.
No workers are alone in this fight. As we tell our stories of fightback, we build working-class unity—the one force the rulers truly fear. Workers will continue to go to any length to defend ourselves, because we can win. We can win a better world for our class—communism.
Why communism? In our vision, the working class will determine the future of society. It will destroy the capitalist world and its brutal exploitation. It will smash a system that drives us into chronic unemployment and poverty. It will smash the racism and sexism that drag down all workers. It will eliminate the racist cops who break our strikes and kill our Black, Latin, Asian and immigrant sisters and brothers. And it will put an end to the imperialist wars that send our youth to kill their class brothers and sisters worldwide, all for the bosses’ profits.
A Communist World
Here is our vision for a communist world:
• A society run by workers and for workers. The working class produces everything of value and should rightfully receive the benefits of our labor. Collectively, we can determine how to share what we produce, according to need.
• Abolition of the exploitative wage system and the money that runs it. We have no need for the blood-sucking bosses who steal the value of our labor through wage slavery.
• Multiracial unity with women and men workers and an end to the racism and sexism that divides the working class. Racism and sexism is rooted in capitalism; the bosses use them to steal trillions in super-profits worldwide.
• Elimination of all national borders, artificial lines drawn by the bosses to make even more profits from workers called “foreigners.” Nationalism is an anti-worker ideology that enables the imperialist rulers to exploit natural resources and cheap labor—and to war with other imperialists in competition for more profit. Communists are internationalists because the working class is one international class, with a common class interest, under one red flag.
This is the world PLP has fought for from our start, more than 50 years ago. We will continue to fight until our class prevails. We invite all workers to join this struggle—for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren.
Our vision for communism can be realized only with millions of workers and youth, with people just like you. Our fight is sparked by class anger against the bloody bosses, kkkops, and all those who serve capitalism. But what sustains our communist movement is our working-class love—for industrial and domestic workers, for soldiers and students. United as one class, freed from exploitation and artificial borders, the working class can build a new a world from the ashes of the old.
May Day is your chance to join Progressive Labor Party. Take the leap. And when you do, you will be joining hands with billions of fighters past, present, and future—with a historic movement of working-class struggle. The future belongs to us, but only if we dare to fight for it. The fight for communism can’t stop, won’t stop because workers can, workers did, workers will continue to fight back!
Long live communism! Power to the workers!
Comrade Bob Leonhardt, one of the early leaders of the Progressive Labor Party, died peacefully on April 6 of complications from amyloidosis. A lifelong, militant, anti-racist fighter, Bob devoted his life to serving the working class in the struggle for communist revolution. He was 72 years old.
Bob seemed destined for a star professorship at an elite ruling-class university. However, his life took a turn in the 1960s at Harvard University where he met the Party and was active in Students For a Democratic Society (SDS). Instead of becoming an ideological weapon of the ruling class, Bob chose the path of communism. He advanced the PLP-led Worker-Student Alliance, bringing campus workers and students together in the fight against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Then he helped organize the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR), a mass organization affiliated with the Party, which launched battles against the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. INCAR’s history remains an important influence on PL’s practice today.
Battling Racism
Bob understood that the overthrow of the profit system is a long-term process. It means forging unbreakable personal ties with many people and winning them to a revolutionary outlook through class struggle. Bob did so wherever he went. When Boston’s rulers lured white working-class families to racism and away from integrated public schools, Bob helped lead our Party’s Summer Project counterattack, including a violent battle to integrate Carson Beach. Thanks to his work and that of other intrepid comrades, PL grew.
In the 1970s, when academic racists like William Shockley were at large on campuses throughout the U.S., Bob exposed their poisonous ruling-class ideology in debates and articles—and on picket lines attacking their college-sponsored speaking appearances. In a classic debate at Columbia University, he wiped the floor with “free speech” advocate Nat Hentoff. He championed our Party’s firm and enduring position: “No Free Speech for Racists!”
A lifelong teacher, Bob spoke French like a native and headed the French-American School of New York. He showed how PLP teachers could use the classroom, no matter what the subject, to teach communist ideas by revealing the contradictions of capitalism. Most important, he taught countless current Party activists crucial lessons in our theory and practice.
Bob was a prolific writer for PL Magazine, especially about dialectical materialism. In the late 1960s, he became editor of CHALLENGE and continued to write for the paper for decades afterward. Always committed to building PLP, comrade Bob left New York in the mid-‘70s to head the Party and InCAR in the Boston area, leaving his advanced studies to become a public school teacher. There he helped lead the 1975 anti-racist Summer Project that fought the racist organization ROAR, which opposed integrating schools. The result was the demise of ROAR.
Paving the Road to Revolution
As part of a PL collective, Bob played an important role in framing our Party’s core documents, including Road to Revolution IV. More recently, in Dark Night Shall Have Its End, he contributed to a dialectical assessment of our class’s revolutionary prospects after the collapse of the old communist movement. He was relentless in attacking liberal misleaders and in warning against right-wing opportunism.
Even as Bob fought the condition that finally brought him down, he remained alert and thoughtful about the politics that shaped his life. A few days before he died, he emerged from a coma with a list of ideas for articles for Party publications.
PLP has no cult heroes. We do, however, have abiding, guiding principles that Bob Leonhardt honored and upheld throughout his too-short life. We shall serve our class well by following his example.
*****
‘The Best Thing in My Life…’
CHALLENGE conducted a series of interviews with Bob Leonhardt in the year before his death. Here are some excerpts:
Mao once said, it took a good ten years for an intellectual to become a communist. Throughout my life, I always found myself tempted by the attractions of a bourgeois career. It was nice being the head of a school, but if I had really wanted to be at the top of the heap, whether it was law or academia, there’s a lot of things I could have done.
But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be both a Nobel Prize-winner and Lenin, right? By having me do certain things, like quitting Columbia when I could have been getting my Ph.D., or sending me to Boston [to become a public school teacher], [PLP co-founder] Milt Rosen in particular was trying to get me to see that my career was really the Party and the work.
Am I sorry I made the choice I made? That’s a question I used to ask myself a lot. Was it right not to have the academic career or be the big shot or make all the money that I probably could have made? When I put it to myself in that way, I never hesitated for a second in thinking it was the right thing to do. The best thing in my life was—and remains—being in the Party. For whatever modest contribution I may have made. The only doubts I had were over whether I would have enough political stamina to stick with it.
Everybody has to face this question at some point. You’ve got a lot of people, including people in your family, or some of your close friends, who may say to you, “You’re wasting your life. You believe in some beautiful ideas, but you’re not going to accomplish anything.” Many of them are people whom we’d like to win, but they don’t understand what winning is. And winning, unfortunately, is not necessarily seeing the promised land. That’s part of what we have to learn to accept; I’ve made my peace with it.
You can always do more, and you have to criticize yourself all the time, and you have to be aware that you’re not god’s gift to anything. And you better realize that what you’re going to accomplish is going to be limited and modest. But you need to keep fighting. And you better keep studying dialectics to keep you on an even keel.
This is a very long, protracted, difficult struggle—a thousand years, Mao said.
When you look at it that way, it’s all the more reason to say that you’re doing the right thing with your life. What you have to hope is that you stay the course and you don’t budge, and that whatever your weaknesses may be, that you get enough help from other people, your comrades, and from just seeing the wonderful things that ordinary people can do to give you inspiration—to give you the strength to go on.
NEW YORK CITY, April 14 — “Democrat, Republican, all the same, racist terror is the name of the game!” “The only solution is communist revolution!” Our multiracial contingent of workers and students, young and not so young, PL’ers and friends, led by women, brought the message to the New York State Republican Gala that any of the candidates, Democrat or Republican, are a dead-end for the working class. While each candidate has some differences in their particular agendas, all will maintain imperialist war and all the ills of capitalism. PLP brought the only real solution for the working class— only communism can meet the needs of our class sisters and brothers around the world.
Carrying a large banner that read “Elections Can’t Fix Capitalism—Fight for Communism!” our lively contingent joined a spirited Fight for 15 demonstration as they marched from Times Square to the hotel hosting the Gala. The Fight for 15 movement brings together workers’ rights groups in the fight for a living wage. At one point along the march, a Trump supporter was spotted along the side holding a sign that said “Build the Wall.” The PL contingent, joined by workers around us, immediately started shouting him down with the chants “No free speech for racists!” and “The fight of the workers, it has no racist borders!/Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!”
It was inspiring when many groups of workers joined us, passionately taking up our chants as they held CHALLENGE high in the air. These workers especially took to our internationalist chants with enthusiasm— “Obreros, unidos, jamas seran vencidos!/The workers united will never be defeated!” The crowd cheered as they noticed a young boy sitting on his dad’s shoulders holding CHALLENGE with his fist held up, as his dad chanted. A Party member spoke on the bullhorn, saying that this child is the next generation- the reason we fight for a better future. Over 500 CHALLENGEs and a thousand leaflets were distributed, and dozens of people stopped to hear and discuss PLP’s arguments for a communist world.
PLP stands out from the crowd when we fight for multi-racial unity and for communism. The electoral process convinces workers that there is a candidate who will fight for them, or at worst a “lesser evil” who will do less damage. But in fact there is no candidate who will end the exploitation of the working class—they can’t—that’s the basis of capitalism! There is no candidate who will end racism—that’s the foundation of making profit under capitalism! There is no candidate who will end inter-imperialist rivalry—that’s how the U.S. maintains power and control of its interests throughout the world!
While Trump is the most obvious racist who would brutally attack all workers, his Republican counterparts are no better. Likewise, the biggest danger to the working class are the liberal Democrats, like Clinton and Sanders (see page 6), who work to win the working class to believe in and support the very system that oppresses them and uses them as cannon fodder.
Every worker around the world must be won to put down the ballot and organize for communist revolution. Only communism smashes racism, sexism, exploitation of the working class, and imperialist war. If you haven’t joined PLP yet, do so now! March on May Day with PLP! We have nothing to lose but our chains.
PAKISTAN, April 19—Three brave workers were killed in the city of Karachi, organizing a strike. The bosses and their police blame “unknown assailants,” with the underlying message that anyone who challenges the bosses will be killed. But the working class here cannot be stopped by horror or threats! The workers are daring and fearless, responding with anger to the situation of our class here and demonstrations are being organized throughout the country.
PLP: Organizing and Fighting Back!
These actions are defying the bosses’ terror in every corner of Pakistan, a country which is a key player in the sharpening imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China. PLP is in the thick of working-class fightback and organizing the fight for communism, to give communist leadership to the working class.
On March 8th, International Working Women’s Day, PLP participated in many events, building women to take the lead in our revolutionary party.
Workers are challenging the capitalist system throughout Pakistan, but their efforts are separated. PL’ers are working hard exposing misleaders of different puppet unions: organizing workers — women and men — in the WAPDA (Water And Power Development Authority), on the railroads, postal, docks, steel, telecommunications, healthcare, home health aides, doctors, teachers, domestic workers, landless farmers, students and professionals.
The bosses know the working class is angry, and they’re bringing forth new political faces. PLP has been exposing the illusions pushed by these politicians and their connections to the very capitalist bosses running Pakistan. PLP is the only party capable of liberating the working class by fighting for communism, not the phony attempts of the bosses to keep their system intact while channeling the workers’ rage into still another politician.
Pakistan Bosses: Biggest Terrorists
Every evil of capitalism is squeezing the neck of the working class. Terrorism, nationalism, fascism, corruption, shortage of electricity, privatization, unemployment, poverty, illiteracy, exploitation, and more. The terrorist capitalist bosses running Pakistan are no different in kind from the small-time terrorists like al-Qaeda which they pretend to be fighting.
Terrorism is useful to the capitalists here, maintaining enough chaos so that working class remains divided, frightened and quiet. The many terrorist groups in Pakistan have the same thing in common: kill innocent workers, soldiers and students. Capitalist bosses use the terrorists to eliminate their political opponents. They’ve especially targeted workers fighting back, like the three workers in Karachi.
These terrorist groups, while being used for various purposes by rival capitalist factions, are influential powers in their own right. Many terrorist groups have strong ties in different government departments, educational institutions and political parties. When the Pakistan Army started an offensive to clear terrorist sanctuaries around the country to contain their influence, the terrorists started attacking schools, universities and parks, killing innocent workers already facing everyday capitalist terrorism.
Capitalism Means Terrorism for Working Class
In the city of Faisalabad, power loom workers have nothing to feed their families. Bosses are closing down factories and profiting by shifting money to other countries. When the power loom workers organized demonstrations, the police beat them. More than three dozen were severely injured, and about three hundred imprisoned where they were tortured and ordered not go on strike again.
There is no concept of safety at workplaces. Most factories don’t have emergency exits. Miners bear some of the worst working conditions, with more than 134 killed in last three months.
Women workers are not even considered human beings. They are the least paid, and are sexually harassed and abused at workplaces. On average, three women commit suicide, four women are raped, and six killed every day in Pakistan. In 2014, about one thousand women were killed.
There are 10 million children working in different industries but ILO-funded fake-leftist NGOs are claiming that child labor has nearly ended! Meanwhile, in the Sindh province, an average of 17 children die per day because of malnutrition.
Pakistan: Key Link in Imperialist Rivalry
Pakistan is a key link in the sharpening rivalry between U.S. and Chinese imperialism. While in the past Pakistani capitalists have been staunchly pro-U.S. imperialist, Chinese bosses have taken giant steps toward seducing the Pakistani capitalists in the interests of their own imperialist ambitions. The current construction projects known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a strategic part of China’s “New Silk Road,” or “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR; see CHALLENGE editorial, 3/9).
CPEC is rapidly constructing networks of highways, telecommunications lines, railways and other infrastructure, as well as enormous gas and oil pipelines linking China directly to Iran. China recently financed the construction of a massive Pakistani deep-water port in Gwadar. It will receive 60 percent of China’s oil imports and pump them directly into China, avoiding the nearby U.S. Navy-patrolled South China Sea.
Our Party in Pakistan is fighting to build a mass international PLP. Our struggle continues. We will send more updates!
