INDIANA, February 11—Progressive Labor Party members giving communist leadership in a multiracial Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest here succeeded in disrupting board meetings at the local airport and zoning meetings at City Hall.
A local mayor’s support for a bid to privatize a prison has since been retracted, a small but significant victory for this integrated group of anti-racist fighters.
Reform victories under capitalism are by nature temporary. The limits of this one are plain to see: while a petition to build the prison within city limits has been retracted, the jailers continue to hunt around the Chicago metro area for a site to construct their new concentration camp.
For the past 30 years, this region has been crippled with purposeful de-industrialization and unemployment. This attack on jobs has a racist edge that cuts all working people. On the heels of communist-led union and militant antiracist fightback from the 1930s to the 1960s, for the first time tens of thousands of industrial jobs were opened in a major way to Black workers in this region. Capitalism’s drive for maximum profit has driven many of these jobs overseas and left the remaining positions saddled with “two-tier” wage structures that lock out future generations from more decent living wages inherited from past class struggles.
Mayor Defends Racist Prisons
After a re-election (in which a little more than one-tenth of over 80,000 residents participated), the mayor released a statement saying she was in full support of the corporation’s plan to build this prison camp close to a nearby airport. This liberal misleader initially defended her support of the prison by repeating the jailer’s unsubstantiated claim that it would bring 200-300 jobs to the city.  In her own words she “visited at least one of those facilities and they seem to treat people in a very respectful way.” This claim was made in spite of the numerous complaints against Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons for the vicious treatment of inmates, ranging from physical and sexual abuse to labor exploitation.
Some local fighters were surprised that she gave her upfront support to a prison project at a time when the racist mass incarceration of Black workers is widespread. In meetings and one-on-one conversations, PL’ers explained that the prison profiteers and the mayor were counting on the likelihood that residents in a predominantly Black city would buy into the faulty racist notion that immigration is “just a Mexican issue.”
The struggle against this prison was waged by a multiracial antiracist coalition of fighters in the city. A major theme in the fightback was that of working-class solidarity among Black, Latin and white workers.
Leaders of these groups stated that the people of our town would not become “slave catchers,” hunting Latin workers in the same fashion that Blacks had historically been hunted during slavery and continue to be treated by cops in our city.
Raising Communism Among the Masses
At mass meetings, a PLP member gave speeches about how change on a local level would not permanently stop businesses like the one we are facing or stop police killings. Only smashing the profit-over-people capitalist system will bring about true change for workers. The comrade said that voting was a bosses’ tool to keep people complacent about their oppression, while spreading the illusion that they have actually done something in their own interests. After the forum, we distributed CHALLENGE.
The ongoing struggle inside the group is to increase our interaction with community members. Our local communist-led Black Lives Matter group conflicts with the BLM’s national leadership and is proving that multi-racial unity in the fight against racism is crucial.
Having made contacts within the community via public meetings and knocking on doors, a more determined effort to build personal ties between those inside the BLM chapter and the PLP is our next order of business. The people in our neighborhoods are mindful of the strangle-hold that capitalism has over our lives. When we push the idea that only a mass movement of workers united to smash the racist and sexist system of capitalism — not liberal concessions — will end our suffering, our friends want to hear more. As we build class struggle together, these conversations will continue.

NEW YORK CITY, February 22—When challenged by Progressive Labor Party and co-workers about the racist special education (SPED) speed-up at a Manhattan school meeting, the principal defended the school’s racist set-up.
At this high school where Black and Latin students comprise 70 percent of the population, Black and Latin special education students embody over 85 percent. This school has a higher-than-average graduate rate of 90 percent. But of the students who don’t receive a high school diploma, 91 percent of them are Black and Latin!
When confronted about this, the principal — fully aware of this racial breakdown — responded that this was an “acceptable” number. A PL’er exposed the principal’s racist view that these students were expendable — “the price of doing business.” The principal — though recently asked by the superintendent how he planned on raising the test scores — was clearly content with an education system set-up that failed students.
The PLP teacher is openly known in the school as a communist. He denounced the racism behind the administration’s cuts in special education services.
Teachers Overworked, Students Underperform
Over half of the SPED teachers in the school are teaching an extra class — the bosses’ shortsighted solution for the problem of too few SPED teachers on staff to provide the services our students need. A lack of services and overworked teachers are attacks that fall disproportionately on the shoulders of the school’s Black and Latin students. This is representative of an overall trend throughout the city for SPED.
Looking forward, the school’s incoming class of 9th graders next school year is expected to have the highest percentage of SPED students in need of extra services in the school’s history. With full knowledge of this, and the extremely high annual SPED teacher turnover rate (the rate at which workers leave and are replaced), the school bosses have no plans to hire the needed number of SPED teachers. In fact, at this meeting the principal boasted that understaffing the SPED department and cutting funding from desperately needed SPED services would be the “new normal.”
Cuts Are For War
This “new normal” spells out an escalating attack on students already beaten down by the school’s racist policies. These cuts in education reflect the U.S. imperialists’ real interests: oil and war. The U.S. war secretary Ashton Carter is seeking a $582.7-billion military budget for the fiscal year 2017 (reuters.com, 2/2/16). This number excludes other departmental military-related spending. In 2014, the total national “defense” spending was $613.6 billion (pogo.org). Meanwhile, education is allotted $100 billion, merely 2.7 percent of the budget (whitehouse.gov).
The PL’er said the high rate of SPED teacher turnover stemmed from overworking these teachers. The majority of the teachers who were coerced, required or intimidated by the school bosses to teach an extra course (in violation of contractual rights to decline teaching beyond the legal number of classes and work hours) are untenured (no permanent job), and so more subject to ill treatment. The United Federation of Teachers (the NYC teachers union) has sided with the principal on this, so the untenured teachers generally understand they have no rights and therefore live under daily stress and fear of the capitalist bosses’ seemingly unlimited power to exploit their labor.
Real Failure: Capitalism
Under capitalism, not every student is expected to graduate, and in fact the profit system doesn’t need or want every student to be “successful” in school. How will the bosses justify racist low wages and unemployment if they can’t blame working-class youth for the system’s own failure? How else will they funnel students into the military to kill for oil wars in the Middle East?
In reality, capitalist schools — through segregation, racist attacks, lack of funding, school-to-prison pipeline attacks on students, and anti-working-class curriculums — are what fail our young people.
The administration claims to work in students’ interests. What a lie! Actually, teachers must ally themselves with student interests. We teachers need to unite with students and parents in order to fight these education attacks. Understaffing means less time with students, and increasing a teacher’s caseload ensures that those students who need the most attention actually get less.
Clearly, capitalism doesn’t value working-class youth. Teachers, parents, students and school workers can help build PLP and collectively organize against capitalism’s relentless attack on the working class, and build a communist world.
Only in a communist society would all students, regardless of ethnic background and learning needs, be seen as worthy of the struggle to not only graduate, but to succeed in acquiring an education that not only meets the needs of an individual student but those of the entire working class.

COLOMBIA, February 24—The embattled imperialists, feeling the pressure from the current over productive crisis and the costs of war, are busy with their policies of super exploitation, racism, fascism, sexism, cultural degradation, and the pillage and destruction of the environment. All of this is done in order to try and solve their financial crisis. This has always been done with the aid of their puppet regimes all over the world.
In the case of Colombia, this means the imposition of miserable conditions for the working class; helped along by the sellouts in the trade unions who are totally complicit in these murderous policies.
The paltry minimum salary of about $207 (USD) a month is a far cry from the $8,000 monthly salary of congressmen, further evidence of the fascist and oppressive capitalist regime.
The commercialization of life in the health sector, where our class sisters and brothers are nothing more than statistics and thousands agonize and die waiting for a simple medical appointment, is still not even the worst that capitalism offers.
Hunger strikes millions who often live malnourished, not even eating what the pets of the wealthy enjoy. The setting could not be worse for our class who are left at the bottom of the social pyramid only to maintain this miserable, corrupt, and oppressive system. This system that uses sleight of political hand to fool workers into thinking capitalism is just, and where economics of “plenty and peace” reign supreme; all the while unleashing violence on those who do not tow the line.
The working class knows though, that the solution to our collective problems does not exist in this society. Workers know that the laws of capitalist profit contradict the peace or quality of life they deserve.
We in the PLP organize in the interest of the international proletariat and support all of their struggles. We do this with the recognition that only the eventual communist revolution will see an end to the dark night of capitalism. We do not fight to reform the system, but rather we organize for worker’s power. What we want is everything we produce. We want no more fake pacifism between classes; the peace of the rich is oppression, death, and the decimation of the poor. JOIN PLP!

CHICAGO, February 4— Sixteen educators were arrested for sitting in at Bank of America.
Members Progressive Labor Party and thousands of school workers, parents, students, and other fighters filled the streets of downtown Chicago to protest a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announcement of $100 million in new layoffs and pay cuts.
Bank of America is one of the banks that have pocketed a billion dollars from CPS that should have gone to fund the schools. These racist cuts primarily target Teachers’ Assistants, who are among the lowest paid school workers and are mostly Black. However, the brunt of the attack falls on CPS students, who are mostly Black and Latin. They will receive fewer resources, larger classes, and less support in school.
CPS says they’re Broke, Charity for Bankers is a Joke
The cause of these cuts? The racist CPS and the parasitic banks that feed off the working class. Banker and former school board chair David Vitale led CPS into a “toxic swaps” scheme, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned out of CPS and into banks’ pockets. CPS refuses to take legal measures to get any of this money back, as governmental bodies in other cities have done successfully. They won’t even ask to renegotiate the toxic swaps.
For too long, CPS has made financial deals that benefit banks and corporations at the expense of the city’s mostly Black and Latin students, but lately it has gotten worse. The number one CPS cost is “debt service”, representing billions of dollars in interest paid to banks and bondholders. The capitalist system is rigged this way: the rich pay little in taxes to support public services, and then make millions off the loans that service providers must take out to meet operating expenses.
Attack on One Is an Attack on All
Teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) have responded to this theft by organizing demonstrations and sit-ins. A key element of the CTU’s strength is its alliance with other sections of the working class: the most recent demonstration involved not only education workers, but also members of several other unions and Black youth from the ongoing fight against racist police murders. The next day, teachers, transit workers, and home care workers distributed a common flyer calling on all workers to fight against state and local cutbacks.
Chicago teachers refuse to stick to demonstrating. In December, the teachers voted to allow leaders of CTU to call a strike, and now it’s only a matter of time until it happens. Union members at many schools don’t want to wait. They are ready to follow the lead of Detroit teachers and organize collective sickdays (see CHALLENGE 2/10).
Strike Against Capitalism
Strikes are an important step in building fightback and class-consciousness, but are limited. In 2012, Chicago teachers went on strike to demand, among many things, no layoffs and funding for smaller class sizes and key programs for students. Only four years later, they are fighting the same fight against the same budget cuts!
Unions also push the illusion that a different politician will make things better, when all politicians actually serve the interests of the capitalist class. “Hey hey, ho, ho, Rahm Emanuel’s got to go” was a popular chant at today’s march. Though Mayor Emanuel is a fierce supporter of the interests of the capitalists, focusing on electing some other capitalist representative obscures the root problem and stops workers from fighting to destroy the system.
Unions and strikes organize to make life minimally better for workers under capitalism, and any gains won through those means can be quickly taken away. When someone has cancer, doctors don’t remove only part of the tumor; it will only grow back! The working class must fight to remove the entire cancer of capitalism and build a system where we can get all of our needs met. To smash racism and build schools that are actually set up for students to prosper, we need to destroy capitalism with a communist revolution.
Only Solution is Communist Revolution
Educators, students, parents, and other workers throughout the city are determined to continue the fight for better schools, but under capitalism, that is a limited fight. The capitalists promote schools that continue racist divisions (Chicago’s schools, as well as others, are as segregated now as 40 years ago) and teach individualism and loyalty to the U.S. government. They prepare students to be good workers or good soldiers or in the most segregated, least wealthy schools, good prisoners. Until the working class runs society, the schools will serve the interests of the rich.
The militant actions will no doubt continue to develop in Chicago and open the door for more workers to learn about Progressive Labor Party and join us in our revolutionary struggle. At the march, hundreds of CHALLENGEs were distributed, and this is only the beginning. As the struggle heats up, we look forward to building the membership of PLP and spreading these ideas widely.